Wagner Moura
“THE SECRET AGENT” My rating: B+ (At the AMC Town Center)
161 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A shroud of dread lies draped over “The Secret Agent,” Kleber Mendonca Filho’s epic yet intimate dive into the reactionary world of Brazil in the 1970s.
We’re put ill at ease in the very first scene. Armando (Wagner Moura) stops his yellow VW Beetle at a rural gas station to fill up. Lying in the drive is a human body. The station operator says the dead guy tried to steal some motor oil and was shot by the night attendant. He’s been waiting for two days for the cops to pick up the body.
Two officers show up, but are indifferent to the festering corpse. Instead they start hassling Armando, demanding identification and going over his car in search of contraband or some violation. When the fuzz find nothing wrong they hit up Armando for a “contribution” to a police charity.
It’s a long scene and an unnerving one. We’re pretty sure that Armando is on the run and avoiding the law, but just what he’s done is a mystery.
The title “The Secret Agent” is meant ironically. For while Armando is a fugitive and an opponent of Brazil’s right-wing government, he’s no spy. He hasn’t been trained to kill. He’s just a guy who has run afoul of the powers that be and is hoping to find refuge in his hometown of Recife.
Tania Maria
He’s taken in by the elderly, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria) who manages an apartment complex where other fugitives like Armando hunker down while awaiting a chance to escape the country.
The shadowy organization that had set up this little conclave for political dissidents also has pulled strings to get Marcello a job in the records department at police headquarters where, uncomfortably enough, he finds himself befriended by the utterly corrupt head cop.
He also finds a few moments with his young son, who in Armando’s absence is being raised by Don Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), father of Armando’s late wife. Alexandre is the projectionist at a big movie house that currently is showing “Jaws” (the year is 1977). In fact, sharks keep popping up in “The Secret Agent,” with the cops investigating the discovery of a human leg inside a dead shark that has washed up on shore.
Among the other characters are a pair of hit men (Roney Villa, Gabriel Leone) who have been contracted by an aspiring right-wing plutocrat to track down and kill Armando.
At certain points “The Secret Agent” dips into surrealism. There’s a sequence in which the severed leg comes to life and begins hopping around, kicking lovers trysting in a park. And one of the residents of Dona Sebastiana’s little commune is a cat with two heads.
In the present we meet a college researcher (Laura Lufesi) whose assignment is to sleuth out the fates of various “disappeared” individuals from nearly 50 years ago. One of her main sources is an old audio tape of an interview Armando made with a sympathetic journalist; now she sets off to find Armando’s grown son (also played by Wagner Moura).
There’s enough going on in “The Secret Agent” to warrant multiples viewings, but even a cursory glimpse will cement Moura’s place as one of the great actors of his generation. It’s a terrifically human performance, one of fear, resolution, love and defiance.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 