The gongs have been clanging in for The Secret Agent since Cannes almost a year ago, where Kleber Mendonça Filho bagged Best Director and Wagner Moura picked up Best Actor (Moura has added a Golden Globe and a gaggle of others to his mantlepiece in the meantime).
Pesky Timothée Chalamet (seemingly behind the wheel of an awards steamroller) will almost certainly put an end to Moura’s spree at the Oscars, although there’s a chance this could pip Sentimental Value for Best International Feature (arguably the category with the better, more interesting movies).
Like some of the greatest Brazilian movies (City of God or the recent I’m Still Here), The Secret Agent is scorched by the equatorial sun, propelled by intoxicating tropicália melodies and swamped in chaos. And as this is 1977, the terrifyingly corrupt shadow of the military dictatorship looms over everything – in a sardonically ominous feat of understatement, the opening credits state this was “a period of great mischief”.
As Moura’s Marcelo trundles up to a remote gas station in his battered Beetle, a casually festering curtain-raiser of a scene as striking as they get spells out just how troubled this era was. A bullet-ridden body lies on the forecourt rotting in the heat, waiting a week to be removed as a pack of stray dogs circle. When the cops do roll up, they’re far more interested in harassing and extorting Marcelo for a few bucks.
Marcelo is en route to Recife in the north of the country (considered a backwood by the seats of power in the south) and a safe house run by uproariously indomitable elderly woman Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria).
Formerly a professor with a potentially lucrative scientific patent, Marcelo learns of a hit on him ordered by a vengeful industrialist, so plans to flee the country with his young son.
While lowlife assassins devoid of any scruples close in on Marcelo (leading a double life as “Armando”), there’s a whole cast of questionable characters scuttling around this shape-shifting labyrinth of a plot. Not least, roving and constantly dangerous sleaze-pit of corruption, police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), who we first meet trying to retrieve the leg of one of his victims from the inside of a shark.
Besides being an absolutely cracking thriller, Filho riddles The Secret Agent with surreal symbolism. One of Marcelo’s housemates is a genuine two-faced cat (you know, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get). That limb reprises itself as violent thug “Hairy Leg”, a bizarre urban myth from 1970s Brazil used by newspapers as a coded reference to atrocities committed by the authorities. The shark isn’t quite done with yet either…
A more sober layer of enrichment is added by two young researchers in modern-day Brazil who are listing to audio tapes of interviews with Marcelo/Armando.
As the gorgeously drawn (and often seductively repellent) characters duck, dive and carouse through the story, events slither towards a street chase you’d be happy to watch over and over again – it’s pure, deep-fried, hard-boiled Brazilian rhythm. After 161 gently hypnotic minutes, every one of them a pleasure, it hardly matters that things wind up somewhat abruptly.
Of the 10 films up for Best Picture at the Oscars, this is in the top three. Awards or not, it’s quite the piece of cinematic gold.
The Secret Agent is in cinemas from February 20
