THE SECRET AGENT

(The Middleburg Film Festival runs October 16-19 in Middleburg, Virginia, and lead critic Chris Reed is on the ground doing coverage for us. Check out his The Secret Agent movie review! Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

The best part of The Secret Agent—winner of both the Best Actor and Best Director prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and the new work from Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau)—is the performance from its lead, Wagner Moura (Civil War). He shines in every frame as a man doing his best to oppose his country’s growing authoritarianism by living with as much integrity as he can. Even when the script drags (the movie runs 158 minutes), Moura’s energy propels the story forward past its less effective sections.

The year is 1977, in the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship, and Moura plays Marcelo, a former university academic returning to the city of Recife, in the northeast of the country on the Atlantic coast. He takes up residence in a group home that shelters a variety of political refugees, so we assume he is also one, though we don’t yet know his full backstory. Little by little, we learn about his past while exploring the troubled history of Brazil at this time.

Mendonça Filho opens with a powerful scene that expresses in stark visual terms the state of things. Marcelo pulls over to fill up on gas near his destination, driving a bright yellow VW Beetle, and is taken aback by the sight of a rotting corpse in the middle of the station. Soon, the police arrive (with a delay of only a few days since the dead man was shot), immediately notice the foreign car, and indirectly demand a bribe from Marcelo. He talks his way out of it, more or less, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of corruption and incompetence.

Once arrived in Recife, Marcelo reconnects with his young son, who is staying with his grandparents (the parents of Marcelo’s dead wife), and begins an investigation into the life of his own mother, for reasons that become clear as the narrative progresses. Meanwhile, a shady businessman hires two hitmen to kill Marcelo, whose name, we discover, is actually Armando. Cutting back and forth between the events that led us here and sequences of 21^st-century journalists researching Marcelo/Armando’s life and death, Mendonça Filho constructs an often-thrilling mystery that folds in on itself in intriguing ways.

It’s also sometimes mildly tedious. There’s nothing wrong with slow cinema, but here those moments merely serve to diffuse the focus and obfuscate the plot. Fortunately, all the rest proves engaging—including a few masterfully tense action segments—and in our present day we need as many examinations of the horrors of dictatorships as possible. Moura and the supporting ensemble give it their all, and the result impresses more than it doesn’t. What is left when only memory, if even that, remains, the movie asks. This is a vital question. Ambitious cinema need not be perfect to be worth watching.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

Middleburg Film Festival; Kleber Mendonça Filho; The Secret Agent movie review

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