Last updated on June 10, 2025
A film by Kleber Mendonça Filho
With: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Gabriel Leone, Udo Kier, Alice Carvalho, Isabél Zuaa, Suzy Lopes, Joálisson Cunha, Beto Quirino, Buda Lira
Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. He arrives in Recife during carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son but soon realizes that the city is far from being the non violent refuge he seeks.
Our rate: **
With The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendoza Filho strives to offer a thriller that constantly seeks to strike a balance between its various components: a story set against the backdrop of major historical events (dictatorship, disappearances, McCarthyism, witch hunts), a plot divided into several mysteries to be solved (a constant treasure hunt for the viewer), a setting in a specific region and its past (the Northeast), a revival of codes borrowed from both Paul Thomas Anderson (a broad and deliberately slow-paced narrative, conceived in layers) and 1970s American cinema (secret conversations in particular, as an immediate and obvious reference), and a sensitive touch around family and Brazil, against the backdrop of carnival (and deaths at each edition, some of which go uninvestigated). This mysterious criss-crossing has the good taste not to spiral out of control too quickly. When it does, it surprisingly conjures up counter-references, such as the popular Jaws, which fuels nightmares that clash with reality, and De Broca‘s Le Magnifique, both shown in a local cinema that is central to the story in which a little boy grows up alongside his grandfather, The father must hide and seek to flee the country if he wants to live a free life, for a reason that will remain a mystery for a long time… The patchwork thus presented, paradoxically relatively unexperimental in its texture (clearly on the side of American political and spy cinema), is slow to convince at first, its long exposition providing relatively few clues as to the film’s primary intention. But in its second half, it finds its rhythm as it lifts the veil, one by one, on each embryonic plot thread scattered here and there, like breadcrumbs. In the end, The Secret Agent reveals its secrets, fills in the gaps, and allows the viewer to piece together the puzzle, to put the events back in order, which finally becomes clear, and in doing so, gives the impression of a beautiful, sweeping political fresco (which nonetheless remains convoluted). A fine exercise in style, a pop culture object in itself (Spielberg is not invoked by chance), it may not be as impactful as it could have been if it had managed to place the story within a more relentless historical logic, if it had contained historical revelations and not just plot resolutions, and above all, if the story had focused more on its subject without making questionable detours, for example, on the fact that Nazis hid and lived freely in South America, even if this scene with Udo Kier plays with a strange humor.
Be First to Comment