“The Secret Agent” Is a Political Thriller Teeming with Life
Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), heads straight from his own Carnaval revels, covered in confetti and lipstick stains, to see the limb at an oceanography lab, where he’s joined by two other officers—his grown sons, Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sérgio (Igor de Araújo). Euclides hopes to keep the discovery out of the press for reasons that soon become evident: a pair of hit men, a stepfather (Roney Villela) and stepson (Gabriel Leone), are working in town with the police’s tacit approval, dumping bodies from a bridge into the sea below.
However censored the Brazilian press was at the time, disappearances are still making the news, including that of a student who hasn’t been seen in several days—the dismembered victim, it’s hinted—who’s the subject of an article that appears in the film’s second part, “Identification Institute.” The title refers to a government office for issuing I.D. cards, where Marcelo, now neatly dressed and well groomed, begins an office job arranged by a well-placed sympathizer (Buda Lira). Marcelo has an additional motive for working there: by searching the institute’s archive, he hopes to fill in long-troubling blanks in his family background. At the office, the story menacingly triangulates, with Euclides turning up as part of an underhanded ploy to help a rich woman while denying a poor one justice. He befriends Marcelo—even as, during nocturnal rounds, he pals around with the hit men.
Mendonça, who is fifty-seven, grew up in Recife and has centered his feature-film career on the city, probing its politics and power dynamics in the dramas “Neighboring Sounds” (2012) and “Aquarius” (2016). He took thematic detours in “Bacurau” (2019), a futuristic fantasy set in a fictitious village elsewhere in the state of Pernambuco, and “Pictures of Ghosts” (2023), a personal documentary about Recife’s movie theatres. “The Secret Agent” is by far his most accomplished film to date, and the only one set during the era in which he grew up. The movie’s physical design conveys delight, wonder, and bitter nostalgia; it feels rooted equally in memory and research, aesthetic imagination and political conscience. With his choice of period-specific flourishes—Marcelo’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the office’s manual typewriters under plastic dust guards, sidewalk pay phones surrounded by modernistic bubblelike booths—the director embraces the fashions and music of the time without losing sight of the brutal misrule associated with them.
Mendonça loves process, and in “The Secret Agent” he draws out scenes at length, unfolding games of concealment and evasion with understated precision and overwhelming tension, dispensing harrowing information with pinpoint restraint. His filmmaking teems with memorably eccentric details that reverberate with thematic significance. One of the movie’s most striking scenes is a curious digression stemming from a triviality—a telegram that Marcelo sends to a benefactor (Marcelo Valle) whose phone is likely tapped. Mendonça shows the telegram at each stage of its journey, as one clerk takes the message, another transmits it, a third prints it at the other end, and then a messenger carries it folded between his fingers to the sympathizer’s office. The oddly jaunty sidebar is capped by a chilling surprise: the addressee is shocked to find that the telegram has already been opened.
Paranoia suffuses the film without showiness or bombast—there are no distorting angles, no dunning musical cues. The ambient terror emerges instead in the careful behavior of characters in the crosshairs, as in two lengthy and finely wrought scenes—the movie’s mightiest emotional pillars—that show Marcelo talking with others under suspicion. In the first, he’s met, in a covert location, by a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who informs him that he’s facing a death threat. He, in turn, tells her the story behind his persecution, a tale involving some of the authoritarian regime’s predatory profiteers, and, in so doing, offers a poignant portrait of an erstwhile ally, his late wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho). In the other such scene, residents of the safe house hold a spontaneous support-group session, during which Sebastiana, the matriarch, is asked about an old photo on her mantel and responds with an aria-like reminiscence of her grimly romantic political past.
