The Secret Agent: Review. By Simon Thompson.
Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent is one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last five years and fully worthy of the awards and praise it’s been getting. This is a movie which, while far from an easy watch, is compelling because of the characters and the consequences of their choices. Its story is so strong that you can go into it completely unfamiliar with the history surrounding Brazil’s twenty years of military dictatorship and still enjoy a first rate drama, similar to The Lives Of Others or All The President’s Men.
The plot of The Secret Agent follows Armando ( Wagner Moura) a left wing academic in hiding and a critic of Brazil’s right wing military regime, who is being hunted by two mercenaries (Gabriel Leone and Roney Villela) sent by Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) a sadistic government apparatchik with a personal hatred of Armando. Without veering too much into spoiler territory, the plot functions as a cat and mouse game between Armando and Ghirotti’s hired goons, as Armando delays fleeing the country with his son Fernando in order to find information on his late mother through his cover job in an identification office.
Stylistically Filho’s direction hearkens back to classic 70s political thrillers such as Costa Gavras’s Z, Coppola’s The Conversation, Bertolucci’s The Conformist , and Elio Petri’s Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion through tight angles, and a palpable and completely justified sense of paranoia. Unlike a lot of those films, which take place in dark rooms or claustrophobic interiors, Filho uses the sun kissed beauty of Recife to tell the movie’s story, giving it a stark contrast between the beauty of the surroundings and the ugliness of Armando’s situation.
The violence is something akin to early Scorsese or Sam Peckinpah, it’s swift, bloody, remorseless, and most importantly of all unchoreographed- a decision taken by Filho that never allows you to treat what you’re seeing just as fiction, but something that happened to numerous people under the cruelty and barbarism of one of South America’s most infamous dictatorships.
Wagner Moura’s performance as Armando is akin to watching Gene Hackman and De Niro at their very best. It’s an understated, yet devastating performance, as you watch a man of great principle and courage suffer for his actions. Moura is such a skilled actor he can give a small look or make a gesture and you know exactly which emotion he’s conveying. The supporting cast, including Maria Fernanda Candido as Elza a dissident organiser, Carlos Francisco as Armando’s father in law Sr Alexandre, and Luchiano Chirolli as Henrique are all excellent – but it’s a cameo role by the now sadly departed German character actor Udo Keir that steals the show.
Like Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction Keir has barely twenty or so minutes of screen time, but dominates the movie in his role as German Jewish refugee tailor, who the bullying local chief of police believes to be a Nazi fugitive. The outward bravery that Keir’s character shows as he stands up to him forms a nice thematic parallel to Armando’s quieter opposition to the regime.
In short, The Secret Agent is an intelligent, adult piece of filmmaking that offers no easy answers and leaves you thinking about it long after the credits have rolled. It’s a film which is both more important than ever given the socio-political state of the world, but at the same time is an engrossing piece of cinematic storytelling that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
