Hide and Seek: THE SECRET AGENT

There’s something fitting about the cheeky yet deadly serious title of The Secret Agent, a loose-limbed and steel-spined character study of a Brazilian epic about life under authoritarianism. The movie takes place in the 1970s, when the country was under a military dictatorship, and, as the opening text states with a straight-faced understatement that’s somehow also clarifying, a time of mischief. It stars Wagner Moura in a natural and comfortable performance as an academic who has crossed a government official and thus has violent men looking to off him. He’s not a secret agent. He’s just a guy. Maybe times like these turn everyone into a secret agent of some kind. The movie ambles along after him trying to live his life, talking to friends, family, reconnecting with his son, driving around, going to the movies. Oh, and he’s looking for a way to survive, connecting with fellow dissidents and slipping around with an alias. That’s just a part of the background drumbeat of life’s routine given the circumstances. The threat of state-sanctioned violence registers as a distant, looming possibility, both real and unreal, predictable and theoretical. As we learn more about his backstory—the movie unspools gently out of order, a fact that registers only eventually as he admits it while narrating a flashback—we see that he’s already been deeply wounded by the regime’s actions in his life. The idea he’ll need to escape forms the backbone of the film’s plotting while it dissipates into generous lingering in scenes, and atmosphere, rich with detail of period and place. 

It’s a movie about the moral and psychological complications of living in an oppressive society that makes planning difficult and interpersonal connection both fragile and essential. But it's also a warmly observant movie about a specific guy, one man's particular life against world historical backdrops. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho consistently makes films rooted in location and style from intimate dramas like the sensitive Aquarius to splashy pulp blends like the violent satire of Bacurau. This new picture is his masterwork, a sprawling widescreen picture of classical craft and vivid memory. Slick with homage and earnest in intention, it is at once a film of the 70s and of our moment. The playful structure luxuriates in its telling, an episodic variety of incidents and interactions (some deadly serious, others sweetly observed, and still others whimsical) arriving with a mix of tones and moods in one coherent blend, each vivid and memorable with the precision of research and feeling of reminiscence. The central performance is so well-drawn, supported by a great ensemble of specific faces and voices, and the world around them so evocatively portrayed, that it’s the sort of all-enveloping film that swells with rich implications and lingers with a spell that’s hard to shake. The film accumulates considerable power as a political thriller imposing upon an intimate, attentive character piece.