THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto) is the last 2025 best picture nominee I hadn’t seen, but I was gonna see it anyway. By coincidence I had just caught up with writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2019 film BACURAU (which he co-directed with Juliano Dornelles) right when this came out here. THE SECRET AGENT is slightly more normal, but still very distinct, and a leap forward in terms of filmmaking prowess. As far as Oscars it’s a surprising choice because it’s in Portuguese and it’s odd and puzzling and and takes its sweet time letting you know what it’s about. But also it kinda makes sense because it’s unique and great and though it’s about Brazil in 1977 it has many echoes of things going on right now over here and elsewhere.
Last year also had a Brazilian best picture nominee – I’M STILL HERE – a haunting story about how people tried to go on living while authoritarianism and corruption were corroding their society in the ‘70s. This tackles overlapping material in a completely different way, a little more comparable to my favorite movie of the year, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. It’s serious and tragic but also very funny and satirical, a realistic world peppered with the surreal, the absurd, the arguably exaggerated that’s somehow truer than if it wasn’t. And it’s that rare pleasure of a movie where I truly have no idea what it’s going to be about or sense of where it’s going but I stay enraptured.
It has one of the best opening scenes I’ve seen in a long time. Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura, CARANDIRU) is on a long drive in his yellow VW bug, he pulls up to a secluded gas station, notices a dead body laying in the dirt, covered with a piece of cardboard. The attendant tells him don’t worry about that, it’s fine. Tells him the whole story of who it is, who shot him and how the police are busy with carnival but they might be by to check it out on Wednesday. Also he chases away a pack of dogs that try to eat the body. Just when Armando is about to pull out, a cop car arrives. When the attendant thanks them for finally coming for the body one of them says “Oh, we didn’t even know about that one,” and goes over to harass Armando, search his car and shake him down for a “donation.”
We don’t know at this point if they’re after him specifically, or if they’re not but he has something to hide, or if he’s just like anybody else minding their own business, getting caught in a fuckin spider’s web and hoping not to get eaten. As the story unfolds we see that he’s driving to the city of Recife, his in-laws have been taking care of his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) since the death of his wife (Alice Carvalho). He’s been set up with an apartment, a job and the new name of Marcelo by a delightful old rebel named Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, who was also in BACURAU).
Another memorable early episode involves the police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) rushing to a university laboratory where a human leg has been discovered in the stomach of a dissected shark. JAWS will be directly referenced; Armando’s father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco, also from BACURAU) books it for the theater where he’s a projectionist to capitalize on the news story, and Fernando is obsessed with seeing it, drawing its poster in crayon and asking questions about it. But Chief Euclides is no Brody. He’s not even the mayor recklessly keeping the beaches open. His concern is that the leg must belong to one of the bodies his boys have disposed of.
Other layers of corruption are explored too. Armando starts working at the I.D. office, which he finds has been hijacked by Euclides in order to set up a favorable hearing for a rich lady to not take responsibility for the negligent death of her maid’s child. For a minute I thought Armando was gonna walk right out the door rather than participate in this shit, but he can’t call attention to himself. We learn (spoiler about whether or not this is a movie about a secret agent) that his wife’s death and his need to hide are related to a utilities director named Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) shutting down their university funded lab so his businesses could profit from their research.
Armando stands up to the bastard, and so does his wife, who Ghirotti crudely insults over dinner. It’s almost as upsetting as the scene with the late great Udo Kier (another returning BACURAU cast member) as a German refugee the cops introduce to Armando. They assume he’s a Nazi in hiding, which greatly offends him as a victim of the Nazis, but they don’t care, they just want him to show them his horrific scars again. In this movie cops, public officials, aristocrats, cronies – they’re all rude, disgusting assholes ruining everything they can, shaking everybody else down for every dollar they can get, humiliating whoever they can. There’s something familiar about that.
So Armando is not a secret agent, but he is sneaking around, hiding his identity, eventually avoiding hitmen brothers Bobbi (Gabriel Leone, FERRARI) and Augusto (Roney Villela, ELITE SQUAD 2: THE ENEMY WITHIN). When he first states out loud that he’s being chased by hitmen he says it with the bemusement you or I would if that happened to us. How the fuck did it get to this? It’s ridiculous. The network that’s protecting him is run by Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido, MY HINDU FRIEND), who he points out is basically running something like the American witness protection program, except it’s private people protecting him from the government.
And it’s not just him. It seems everyone in his building is a political dissident, not all of them from Brazil. I really like the minor characters of Tereza Vitória (Isabél Zuaa, GOOD MANNERS) and António (Licínio Januário), refugees from the Angolan Civil War who seem to be further along in their journey of persecution and less willing to talk or take other risks. But Dona Sebastiana is the obvious MVP character of the movie. She laughs about being called a commie and an anarchist, and tells stories about the old days which include the detail that there are three (3) things she did back then that she will not ever tell them. Pretty good mystery brag. Also she thinks of everything, including making sure the apartment smells nice before Armando moves in. I think all of us can agree we would love for Dona Sebastiana to be our landlord if it didn’t require, you know, being in a position to need her as your landlord.
Alexandre is a lovable character too. He’s a little icy when he thinks Armando fucked around on his daughter (which he doesn’t exactly deny), and protective of his custody of Fernando. But he’s a sweet guy and he lets Armando use his theater for a meeting with Elza. That’s a favor to us too because we get to enjoy the old time movie palace environment, the projection booth, the vintage posters, the upstairs apartment with a beautiful view (I sure didn’t have that when I was a projectionist). The window is great not just as aspirational job fantasy but because Elza sits facing it during their talk and a breeze comes in blowing her hair around, making her look glamourous.
I love that a woman in the lobby is freaking out, thinking she’s possessed, but it’s not even THE EXORCIST playing – just THE OMEN. Another great movie lover touch is not at the theater, it’s an absurd scene in the style of a b-movie, dramatizing a ridiculous newspaper story about the leg found in the shark coming to life and hopping around kicking and stomping people cruising at a park or making out in cars. They call the leg “The Hairy Leg,” which I kinda thought should be the title instead of THE SECRET AGENT.
It turns out I was misinterpreting the scene, though. I took it to be sensational tabloid fodder meant to distract from the truth that the police were covering up, so I was interested to read in an interview with Filho that it’s really the opposite. He says “hairy leg” was journalist code for something that had been censored, and this story was their way of communicating that police were attacking gay people in the park.
I already put it together before reading it that Filho was the same age as Fernando at that time, living in Recife, obsessed with JAWS. He’s definitely trying to bring some of his childhood memories to life, but it’s not all nostalgia. It’s mostly musing about our memories and the different ways we record them. There is discussion of things we think we remember but we’re really remembering the story we were told about it, things we sort of remember because we have photos. Armando is searching for a photo documenting the mother he never met, researchers in the future are digitizing cassettes of Armando’s conversations, feeling close to a person they don’t know, and events before they were born. (It’s a real shock to suddenly see earbuds.)
There are so many interesting things about this movie, but maybe the fuel pushing it into greatness is the performance by Moura, who was deservingly nominated for best actor. I first paid attention to him as the lead in ELITE SQUAD and was surprised when he started showing up in English-language projects from ELYSIUM to Mr. & Mrs. Smith. This is a real charismatic leading man performance reminiscent of some of the movie stars of the era when it’s set, but with one slight difference. Generally if you’re thinking a cool ’70s movie, a spy movie, a crime movie, a political thriller, there’s gonna be one or more parts where the hero is looking cool holding a gun. So I like that Moura captures a ‘70s masculinity despite his character scoffing at the idea of owning a gun. There’s a good quote about that in the Golden Derby interview with Filho:
What I said to Wagner is, “I don’t want you to hold a gun, shoot a gun, kill anyone. You don’t have a gun in this film, all right? You’re just like us.” As people, myself and Wagner, we don’t do guns. We don’t carry guns. We don’t own a gun. And that’s how we lead our lives. And that’s what I wanted for him as a character.
And some people would say well then, you’ll end up dead. As if the alternative of killing people is a no-brainer solution, even though you’d still likely end up dead, possibly shot by the cops in the opening scene and left with the guy under the cardboard, or fed to the sharks.
Yeah, there is some gloom in this movie, it’s sad in ways you might expect and in others you definitely won’t. But also it says unfortunately this shit happens, but life does go on, some people do care, some things do improve. I guess that’s enough to feel optimistic these days.
