When Marcelo (Wagner Moura) first arrives at Dona Sebastiana’s apartment, he is greeted by a curious cat whose head is split into two perfect faces, each facing a different direction. In some ways, Brazil is like that cat, always looking at two realities at once: the past that shaped it and the future that it stumbles upon with determination.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent the first finds Moura’s character arriving in his homeland of Recife after spending a long time in São Paulo. Driving bright yellow VW Beetle, this man’s first impression of his hometown is a horrifying one: a corpse laid out in front of a gas station, blood and oil sinking into the arid northeast. It is a sign of what is to come, a bad omen for troubled times, when violence is not only uncommon but sanctioned. Corner 1977and Brazil has just passed the halfway mark of a dictatorship that will last another eight years but will define much of the country’s identity for decades to come.
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The Secret Agent comes two years after Mendonça Filho Pictures of Ghostsa film about the film palaces of his beloved Recife. That project would take seven years, some of which involved his later writing. This fusion is felt as the two works enter into each other, existing in a world of memory where one is made by the time machine, the other by the paracosm.
Alexandre, creator of Recife’s Cinema São Luiz and a prominent figure Pictures of Ghostsit returns here as part myth, part reality. Played by Carlos Francisco in the same loose and open terracotta shirt, the fictional Alexandre is Marcelo’s father-in-law and, more importantly, the grandfather of his youngest son, Fernando. The man is the gateway to bring the popular cinema of Mendonça Filho to the entertainer, the palace of the movie labyrinthine corridors and small hidden rooms prove the perfect location of Marcelo’s secret testimony.
The reason for that testimony, given by a mysterious man to Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), is at the heart of this political entertainer who drinks from the fountain of the American common and spits violently at his Brazilian counterpart. Love Bacurauthe film is shot in anamorphic Panavision, and only Bacuraucombines the vivid – and historical – aspects of the format to honor Mendonça Filho’s classics you’ve probably watched on the same screens as Marcelo peering out of the booth window as sweat drips onto the celluloid.
Filho’s cinephilia is woven The Secret Agent both diegetically and non-diegetically. It exists in the world of film with Fernando’s drawings of Steven Spielberg’s nightmare-inducing poster. Jaws and São Luiz, where Richard Donner The Omen sending panicked customers and John Guillermin King Kong taunted in the tent. But it’s also very much present in the film’s design, with the stunning cinematography of Evgenia Alexandrova – marking the first feature of Filho’s fiction without regular collaborator Pedro Sotero – gnawing on the wide Panavision frame to evoke Brian de Palma-esque tension and playing with depth to heighten the sense of foreboding.
In this case, The Secret Agent it is also independent, not only in its connection with the navel Pictures of Ghostsbut in the way Filho revisits the central themes and aesthetic products of his previous work to create his own sensationalism. You have a sense of community and harmony Neighborhood Sounds, and Sebastiana’s refugee team that shows a tumultuous microcosm of shared love, joy, and sorrow; a lot Aquariusthis is a film that shows the importance of belonging, of focusing on the home that goes beyond the proverbial; and the chaotic violence and punk of Bacurau he’s here again, when the director cuts off limbs and skin and bones alike, bursting and ripping and slicing with delicious ruthlessness.
The filmmaker has also enlisted key recurring partners for this epic adventure 1970s Recife. Production designer Thales Junqueira creates cocoons in safe houses, lining shelves with precious mementos and knick-knacks, each a portal to another world, at some point. Offices turn into escape rooms, crowded and tight, the clicks of typewriters merge into a magical countdown. Costume designer Rita Azevedo styles Moura after the Brazilian flag, with yellow graphic tees, blue polos, and blue shirts assembling a wardrobe that feels more contradictory than patriotic.
But The Secret Agent Indeed, it is a film that belongs to him, and possibly Mendença Filho’s most refined, straight-laced work yet. Moura anchors this historical narrative as a tale of the afterlife that embodies the horror of a kind of pessimism masquerading as tenacity, his gaze filled with aching longing for a future doomed to always be possible. A large ensemble cast, numerous and attractive and always interesting to watch and listen to, crowns a film that captures the fabric of people with confident hands, hungry for those they love.
