To filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, Recifé, the capital city of Brazil's northwest region where he grew up, is what Fenyang in Shanxi Province means to Jia Zhangke. Like Jia, Mendonça Filho, has been chronicling the changing times, in both real and fictional stories of his beloved region. After series of critically acclaimed films in and around Recifé, he comes up with The Secret Agent, a sun-lit neo-noir/political thriller taking place in 1977, which makes a great companion piece to Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his documentary about history and cinema in Recifé.
Mendonça Filho, using the meticulously recreated old Recifé as a backdrop for a story about a man on the run, trying to navigate the place where daily violence and corruption are rampant under the country's military dictatorship.
As Marcelo/Armando (Wagner Maura) arrives in a dusty, desolate gas station on the outskirts of the town, he finds a dead body lying on the ground, partially covered with rocks and cardboard boxes. The proprietor of the station is completely nonplussed by the bullet riddled body. Since all their resources are tied up for the carnival, which is just wrapping in town, cops won't come until Ash Wednesday, he says to Marcelo. But soon the cops arrive, not for the body, but to shake up Marcelo for bribery. From the beginning, the filmmaker lets us know that violence and death are everyday occurrences for the citizens of Recifé with corruption in law enforcement normalized.
Armando under alias, Marcelo, is welcomed by a propriator Donã Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) of a building complex doubling as a refugee hideout. It is slowly revealed that Armando was a university researcher who rubbed a powerful company head and now a high ranking government official, Ghirroti (hailing from Sao Paolo), the wrong way. They met in 1974 and had a blowout, due to Ghirroti's attitude towards what he deems as country hicks (Armando and his research team) and his extreme southern arrogance. Now Ghirroti wants to eliminate Armando and send two assassins (a disgraced ex-military and his stepson) from the south.
Fernando, Armando's adorable young son, has been raised by his grandfather Alexandre (who is based on the real life film projectionist who was featured in Pictures of Ghosts), but longs to live with his fugitive father. Armando is in Recifé not only to retrieve his son back but to find out about his mother's past since she was from the region. With the help of underground resistance network against military dictatorship, he gets assigned a job in an ID issuing government facility in town, which also happens to be in the same building as the police station, lead by corrupt cop, Euclides. Armando needs to juggle and pit the unsuspecting police and assassins against each other while he waits for the new passport to arrive.
Tall and bearded Wagner Maura is effortlessly sexy with his sad eyes in his fugitive ways. And the film's filled with memorable characters and faces. Udo Kier shows up in his last role as a reclusive German Jew partaking in the wild street carnival.
As with all other Mendonça Filho films, the geopolitics of Brazil, the class struggles, regional culture and personal memories all vividly intersect in The Secret Agent. The title gives Armando's story an air of hero's tale full of intrigue and curiosity. It also has a lot to do with the pulpy cinema tradition and telenovelas which the filmmaker was brought up in. There's an urban legend story brought to life in a man's leg discovered in a shark's stomach and police trying to cover it up. There's a sequence of a severed leg moving around and attacking unsuspecting people participating in cruising sessions in the public park at night. Also the significance of the American influence in pop culture is everywhere - Jaws was playing in theaters in 77 in Brazil, so was Omen and Chicago's If You Leave Me Now is on the radio all in the backdrop of seedy and dangerous Recifé in the 70s.
With Bolsonaro and ultra rightwing factions of the Brazilian political spectrum being in charge for the past decades, The Secret Agent is also about rebuking anti-intellectualism by having university researchers both past and present the heroes of the film which is very pertinent in our own political climate. Slow at revealing the plot and not spoon feeding the audience with all the information and backstory, the film beckons at your curiosity to find out more about the not too distant past of checkered Brazilian history. Definitely one of the year's best.
No comments:
Post a Comment