The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonco Filho) is a very big movie. It digresses, sprawls, and zigzags through time with abrupt flashbacks and flashforwards -- the narrative doesn't proceed diachronically, but rather begins in media res and, at the end, projects itself forward into the present. The film has a large cast of characters interacting with one another, spans many years, and explores in a leisurely process a number of themes, not all of them consistent with the picture's principal plot points. The tone of the movie also varies from grotesque comedy to neo-realist austerity with surrealist episodes tossed in for a good measure. The Secret Agent doesn't aspire to be a movie but an entire world, a portrait of Brazil in the mid- and late seventies -- it is, to borrow a phrase from Henry James, a "loose and baggy monster." Some movies are so ambitious as to dwarf most films -- two recent examples come to mind: Brady Corbett's The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' version of Frankenstein, Poor Things (for that matter Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein also has this character). By contrast, some movies that are supposed to be very big seem small, even claustrophobic -- I'm thinking of the Dune films by Denis Villeneuve which are shot in the dark and largely involve dynastic bickering with characters whispering to one another in dim cloistered rooms. For better or worse, there's more in The Secret Agent than I can comfortably describe and the film is more varied than my account will make it seem -- it's simply more diffuse and difficult to assimiliate than most other movies. Furthermore, the picture assumes a knowledge of Brazilian history which I don't possess.
The movie starts with a paradigm sequence. A man, seemingly named Marcelo, is driving a bright yellow VW beetle through an arid landscape. He stops for gas, noting a decomposing corpse lying by the station, under a flimsy panel of cardboard. (It's the result of a robbery that went awry.) The older men in this movie are frequently shirtless or have their shirts wide open over their bellies -- it is very hot and humid in Brazil. A middle-aged fat attendant, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt, pumps gas for Marcelo and tells him about the corpse and how it has been rotting in the sun, harried by feral dogs, for the last week. Some half-naked girls in a car drive up, sniff at the corpse, and make a rapid exit, music blasting in their vehicle -- they are drunk and celebrating the carnival. Two sinister highway cops show up. They take no interest in the body which the dogs are sniffing around. Instead, they harass Marcelo, apparently, wanting to put the bite on him for a bribe. Marcelo says he doesn't have any money and the corrupt cops have to be satisfied with a half-pack of cigarettes, the only bribe Marcelo can make. Marcelo drives to Pernambuco, a northern Brazilian city in the vicinity of Sao Paulo. There he finds a dwarfish old woman, Dona Sebastiana, who is related to him somehow and a group of eccentric neighbors, including some Angolans and a robust, lusty lady dentist (with whom Marcelo has an affair.) Although it takes a while for us to understand this, Marcelo's wife, Fatima, has died. Marcelo has left his child with Fatima with his in-laws: the grandfather is the projectionist at the Cinema de Luz in the city. Marcelo is some kind of academic, but seems to be on the run. And, in fact, most of the people around him in Pernambuco are fugitives of one kind or another -- the Angolans are fleeing persecution in Angola, a number of the other people in the circle are also on the lam from a corrupt and vicious government in Brasilia. (People say that the government has got itself up to "mischief.") After its prologue at the gas station, the film is divided into three novelistic sections: "A Boy's Nightmare," "Identification Institute", and "Blood Transfusion."
In "A Boy's Nightmare", we learn that Marcelo's son is afraid to go to the movie Jaws, playing in revival at the movie theater where his grandfather works. His fear is based, in part, on a macabre discovery -- a big shark caught off the beach has been dissected and found to contain a partially digested human leg. Fernando, the little boy, has made a picture of the nightmare creature with the leg sticking out of its toothy maw. The shark is clearly symbolic, probably representing the predatory aspects of Brazilian politics in 1977. Marcelo goes to work at the "Identification Institute" where he is researching his family history -- he wants to know about his mother who died when he was young. (She is said to have been a "slave" of a wealthy family whose son, Marcelo's father, got her pregnant). Meanwhile in Brasilia, a plutocrat named Ghirotti hires two menacing assassins to travel to Pernambuco to kill Marcelo (this is confusing to some degree because Marcelo is the hero's nom de guerre; his real name is Armando). The killers are a scary-looking Corporal discharged from the armed forces and his stepson and protege, the steely eyed murderer, Bobbi -- he is the Corporal's stepson and, it is rumored, that the Corporal killed his mother. The assassins fly to Pernambuco where it is Carnival season with the streets flooded with merry-makers. Already 91 people have died inthe Carnival and, perhaps, more will end up dead before the party concludes. There are three strange digressions which I didn't fully understand. A German tailor impresses the local hoodlums with his scars from World War II. We think he's a Nazi but, in fact, the man is a Belgian Jew and refugee. (The German seems to thinks it expedient to let people think he's a bad-ass Nazi -- the part is played by the redoubtable Udo Kier who seems to have been fantastically active in the last year of his life; he also has a major role in this year's season of the Navajo detective series, Dark Winds). A wealthy woman has not watched the child of her servant properly --this has resulted in the three-year old girl being run over and killed. The servant calls for justice and a big meeting with lawyers is set up for the Identification Institute (which bizarrely the cops claim to be the Police Station.) Media gets involved in the story and there's a fracas of screaming and crying women at the Identification archives. (I couldn't figure out this digression.) Finally, some crooks go to the morgue, pick-up the shark-gnawed leg (because they are afraid it will be identified) and substitute, apparently another leg -- things are so chaotic in Brazil that apparently dismembered legs are just lying around. The real dismembered leg is insulted by this treatment and, somehow, rises from the dead, hopping vigorously around a public park full of people fucking in threesomes (seemingly Brazilian parks get very lively after dark); the leg chases the lovers around kicking them in the ass with great and alarming force. (Again, I didn't fully understand this sequence, but expect it may have something to do with Brazil's exuberant tabloid culture -- the adventures of the "Hairy Leg" are front page news and sell-out extra editions of the papers.)
In the second part of the film, Identification Institute, we learn why the vicious Mr. Ghirotti has commissioned the hit on Marcelo (Armando). Ghirotti is from the South and feels all Brazilians in the north part of the country are indolent slackers. Ghirotti, an industrialist, goes to the University of Pernambuco where Armando (as I will call him henceforth) is running an industrial engineering department with about 12 colleagues. Ghirotti meets with Armando and says that he will use his contacts in Brasilia, the Capitol, to shut down the department unless Armando gives him rights to the patent on a leather-tanning machine that he has invented. With his half-wit and sadistic son, Ghirotti insults Armando's wife who is lower middle class -- after all her father is a movie projectionist, although a righteous and hardworking man. They are at a cafe and Fatima, Armando's wife, is incensed and returns the insult to Ghirotti. The plutocrat is not used to this sort of treatment particularly from a despised northern Brazilian wench whose father is lower middle-class. And, so, he apparently decides to have Armando, whose wife has now died from pneumonia, killed. Bobbi and the corporal hook up with the local gendarmes who are all totally and cheerfully corrupt. They drive around town drunk and plotting violent mischief. In the film's last section, "Blood Transfusion", the assassination plot comes to a head. The two killers are slothful themselves and they hire a local stevedore, whom Bobbi, the corporal's step son, calls "an animal" to his face to murder Armando. The attack goes awry and two of the local cops are gunned down by the murderous stevedore. Bobbi goes in pursuit of Armando but finds the assassin hiding in a barber shop; he has left a blood trail from being shot in the leg. Bobbi heedlessly barges into the barbershop and is killed by the stevedore. (The stevedore says something like "who's the animal now.") At a final party, the group of exiles and refugees plans to leave Pernambuco -- Armando is going to pick up his son, Fernando, at the movie theater; the various refugees from government violence plot to leave the country and the Angolans are immigrating to Sweden. The matriarch who leads this group, Dona Sebastiana, talks about fleeing Brazil in the thirties to live in Paris where she had a French lover. The party ends with a round of toasts and it seems that all will be well although the murderous Corporal is still at large. Two young women are studying the story, listening to recordings of statements made by Armando in 1974 and 1976-78. For some reason, the young women are transcribing the recordings. One of them, Flavia, gets the recordings of Armando's statements -- she regards Armando as a sort of hero and freedom fighter. (We have seen a newspaper on micro-fiche showing a gruesome picture of Armando gunned down on the streets of Penambuco.) Gradually, we understand that this part of the movie is a kind of epilogue and takes place in the present. Flavia goes to a hospital where she donates blood. The doctor supervising the operation is Fernando, Marcelo/Armando's son now middle-aged and distinguished. Flavia talks with Fernando about his father's story. Fernando tells Flavia that after he went to see the movie Jaws with his grandfather all of his nightmares about predatory sharks ended. (The suggestion is that film, by confronting our fears, can heal us from historical trauma.) Fernando drew pictures of his lost mother, lost father, and himself riding bravely on the back of a Great White Shark. The doctor doesn't seem to think that dwelling on the past is of much use. The last shot shows a brightly lit convenience store with pop music blaring from it. (Throughout the movie, pop songs have been an index of time and the period in which the movie is set -- for instance, we hear a pop song by the group Chicago setting the story in the mid-seventies.)
I like enigma. There are many aspects of this film that I can't quite explain. (For instance, a shot of Udo Kier in the street celebration ecstatically dancing with the rest of the crowd, many of whom wear masks and Indian headdresses.) These mysteries endear the movie to me and, despite some dull passages-- there is a long intensely detailed discussion at the University of Pernambuco about Ghirotti's denial of funding to the department -- the movie is surprising, moving, and mostly a treat to watch. The camerawork makes the heat and sun palpable and the violent scenes are graphic and impressive. The movie is long, 2 and 1/2 hours, but it is worth your time.
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