As ever, this year’s Oscars have their half-dozen or so favourites and frontrunners, some truly outstanding movies among them. But the one that has stayed in my mind is a knight’s move away from the talking-point consensus: an amazingly sophisticated, wayward and garrulous film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and droll and yet in its final act escalates stunningly from lugubrious mystery to cold-sweat tension and violence.
When the best picture Oscar is announced, my heart would sing to see its husband-and-wife producers Emilie Lesclaux and Kleber Mendonça Filho go on stage to accept it for their drama-thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it’s a movie made with effortless style and touched with pure cinematic inspiration. The opening scene alone, with its queasy black-comic unease, is itself a kind of masterpiece. It is like Antonioni’s The Passenger mixed with Leone and Peckinpah and a pulp shocker by Elmore Leonard. Yet it has a kind of novelistic, episodic quality – a cool, discursive self-awareness. You might call it a little miracle, although at near-epic length (2hrs 40mins), it’s actually a very big miracle.
The setting is the Brazilian city of Recife during the 70s military dictatorship. Wagner Moura plays Armando, a widower and professor of engineering who, though not really any sort of dissident or leftist, is now an enemy of the state. He goes on the run in his yellow VW Beetle – the director mischievously makes VW Beetles a recurring motif – from Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a businessman with government connections, racist attitudes, misogynist tendencies and mafioso vengefulness. Armando had angrily confronted this bigwig over his plans to close down his university department and appropriate its research for his own corrupt purposes – and for his drunken insults to his now late wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho). Mendonça hints that his buried rage at the way Ghirotti insulted her is also driven by guilt at what might have been his own infidelities.
So Ghirotti hires two grotesque hitmen, Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and Augusto (Roney Villela), to whack Armando for 60,000 cruzeiros, a job they promptly subcontract to a local villain Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) for 4,000 cruzeiros. Meanwhile, Armando has to go underground, lying low under a fake name in a safe house owned by a resistance movement and run by a kindly old ex-communist woman, Dona Sebastiana – a lovely performance from the director’s nonprofessional stalwart Tânia Maria. And he yearns for nothing more than to see his son, now being looked after by his elderly parents-in-law – his father-in-law is a projectionist at the local cinema, which is showing a trailer for The Man From Acapulco, a caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo (called “the secret agent”).
And all this in the city which is in the middle of its annual carnival, whose bacchanalian chaos is being used as a cover by the hideous local police chief Euclides Cavalcanti (Robério Diógenes) – surely one of cinema’s great sweaty cop villains – to have at least 100 people killed or “disappeared”. Euclides loves to pay unwanted social calls to German expatriate tailor Hans (a final, magnificent cameo performance from Udo Kier) – the cop is starstruck because he thinks he is a fugitive Nazi and cannot grasp that Hans is a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
To add to all this, the city is also in the grip of Jaws-like fever: the Spielberg classic has made everyone shark crazy, so everyone is hooked on news that a shark has been found with a human leg in its stomach – to the intense discomfiture of Euclides. The leg clearly belongs to one of the corpses he has thrown into the sea. This shark is in everyone’s dreams – it is bringing to fascist Brazil the return of the repressed: the truth about what is happening. As for Armando, while he tries to get a passport for himself and his boy to quit Brazil, he has a job in the government’s ID department, and tries, with poignantly suppressed sadness, to find documentary records of his own late mother.
That opening scene! A vast sunbaked plain with a lonely petrol station at which Armando pulls up and is astonished to see a corpse lying in the dusty road outside, with a bit of cardboard laid over it. The station attendant explains that it is the three-day-old body of a thief killed by his own employee who has now run off. The police have been called, but of course haven’t arrived. Nothing could be less of a priority. But then, just at that moment, two cops do in fact arrive: as venal and semi-competent as any other authority figure, they proceed to do nothing but harass Armando and solicit bribes. The scene is hilarious yet upsetting and it returns in Armando’s dreams. (And mine.)
When the final bravura action sequence kicks off, its climax is all the more shocking and melancholy for happening off camera, from the viewpoint of the historical researchers in the present day trying to reconstruct these events through newspaper records and audio-cassette interviews that the movement recorded at the time.
The Secret Agent is almost entirely non-political; really the only character pugnacious enough to offer a socialist opinion is the formidable Dona Sebastiana. Otherwise its dissidence expresses itself in mood, rhetoric and attitude. The resistance leader Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) is amused by Armando’s comment that his fake identity is like an American witness protection programme. Elza replies: “Over there, that is done with a lot of dough and by their government. Over here, it’s all a bit improvised, Brazilian-style – and to protect you from Brazil!”
In a way, that describes the film’s own procedure: a bit improvised, on the surface anyway. The film meanders and loops; it brings in vivid subsidiary characters for hardly any more reason than to briefly introduce them. All human life is here, and Wagner Moura’s performance has intelligence and strength.
