Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!
There were times when I was watching The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto in the original Portuguese) when I felt like I had seen this movie before. The reason is that it feels like it covers a lot of the same territory as I’m Still Here from the previous year. Both films deal with the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s and with the lives that were devastated or lost under that regime. I’m Still Here deals with a woman looking for what happened to her husband. The Secret Agent deals much more with the direct victim of the violence. The stories are different but similar, and feel united even though they take place years apart and concern different people.
Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) is a dissident in a Brazil that has been under military rule for more a decade. He travels to Recife where his in-laws are taking care of his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) ever since Armando’s wife Fátima died. He finds his way to a sort of commune of dissidents and takes the name Marcelo as an alias. He is placed by the group in a job at the city office that creates identity cards. This allows him the opportunity to look for information on his mother, who he knows very little about.
We are also introduced to Euclides (Robério Diógenes), the local civil police chief, who offers him protection even though it’s clear that Armando/Marcelo doesn’t actually like him much. We’re introduced to Euclides when he and his sons are called to the morgue to be show a captured shark that, when cut open, revealed a severed human leg.
To give us a third leg of this tripod, we’re going to also spend a few minutes in São Paulo where a man named Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) hires a pair of hitmen named Augusto and Bobbi (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) to find and kill Armando. The reason for all of this happening is that Armando was witness to Ghirotti’s theft of money and intellectual property. In the regime of the time, having power meant using that power for personal gain and for removing those who objected.
Perhaps the oddest part of the film concerns the leg. It appears several times in the film, including some animated sequences where the disembodied leg attacks gay couples in public parks at night. While this seems surreal for a film based otherwise in reality, this is actually based in reality as well. It was a genuine urban legend in Recife at the time, but was in fact a sort of coded message to talk about police violence without actually calling it out—a sort of code to talk about state-sponsored and sanctioned violence.
The Secret Agent is an odd film in that the different plot points seem to circle around each other for a long time. The leg subplot, while based at least partially in fact, feels out of place in terms of how it is presented. It’s not always clear how things are connected.
The Secret Agent does feel a little Oscar-baity but not in a bad way in this case. Lives that exist under this kind of oppressive regime are clearly a current topic in large parts of the world. What happened in Brazil happened before in earlier years and what happened there is happening now. It’s Oscar bait in the sense that this is about a real topic, and a big topic. It’s “important” in that sense, but it is actually important. The senselessness of parts of it, the obscene ridiculousness of the leg story, seems currently relevant.
But the main story here is the idea that Armando is being hunted, that he is under a cloud for his actions or beliefs, and that nowhere is really safe for him for long. It’s not coincidental that in Brazil at the time Jaws was a huge film and reminders of this appear throughout the film. We’ll see moments of bodies being removed by criminals or other bodies simply being left where they died because no one cares enough to deal with them.
Wagner Moura is one of the main reasons I watched this, and Moura is one of the better parts of the film. A lot of what he does through the film, though, is simply look worried. It’s a good performance, but it’s also one that has gotten a lot of attention, and more than I think perhaps it should. It’s a good, even a very good performance. I’m not convinced of its greatness.
The movie is good, but I don’t know that it needs to be seen a second time.
Why to watch The Secret Agent: History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
Why not to watch: If you’re some kind of purist, there are aspects of this that will bother you.
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