Arash AziziCannes is a loyal festival and it is no surprise that it has welcomed back Brazilian director Kleber Menconça Filho whose two previous stints at the competition, Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019), both did well. In 2023, he had a documentary, Pictures of Ghosts, in Cannes’ Special Screenings section. He has now come to the festival with The Secret Agent, set in 1977 in Filho’s hometown of Recife in northeastern Brazil.
The title of the film and casting of the energetic Wagner Moura as the lead, a political dissident on the run, might give you the impression that this will be a film as action-filled as his Bacurau and as political as the mostcelebrated Brazilian title of last year, I Am Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024.) Such perceptions are entirely misplaced. In fact, Secret Agent has much more in common with Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, a documentary tribute to the Recife he grew up, in that heady moment of late 1970s, the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
This intimate familiarity allows Filho, aided by the evocative cinematography of Evgenia Alexandrova, to masterly recreate Recife. Its story line might suggest a harrowing political drama: Marcelo (Moura) flees to Recife to find refuge as he works for a clandestine political network (hence him being a ‘secret agent’) while also being on the run from a pair of hired assassins. To add to the context’s brutality, a man’s leg is discovered inside the body of a shark, a developing story line that will feature throughout the film in a variety of ways. For instance, Marcelo’s former father-in-law wants to screen Jaws in a cinema he works in to bank on the story’s popularity.
But these are not drivers of thrill or drama but mere flashes that interrupt the film’s slow and warmth reconstruction of Recife 1977. The film remains fundamentally disinterested in action or overt politics. Its most successful scenes are of episodic nature, not connected to any overall plot. There is Hans (played by German actor Udo Kier), who is admired by a thuggish police chief who believes he got his scars by serving as a German soldier in the Second World War. There is a cruel irony here as Hans is actually a Jewish victim of the Nazi persecution who hides his menorah shortly before the chief darts into his room. Then there is a flash-back scene when Marcelo’s feisty wife, Fatima, tells a top bureaucrat to go “fuck himself” after he had disrespected her and Marcelo in a restaurant.
At the film’s world premiere at Cannes’ Grand Theater Lumiere on Sunday, the audience clapped for Fatima’s bold gesture. This speaks to the potential political force that lies in the film. Fatima’s Blackness, and that of her father who continues to be close to Marcelo, further charges the dynamics, given the racist realities of Brazil at the time. But the energy injected by the restaurant scene can’t shake the film out of its slumbering mode. As it meanders around the life of Marcelo and his surroundings, The Secret Agent doesn’t try to tell much of a story.
This shouldn’t be objectionable on its own. It is certainly possible to make a great film without the thrills of a narrative or boldness of a particular politics. But the problem with The Secret Agent is that it doesn’t have much else to make up for this loss. The funky colors of the Seventies Brazil pull us into the film early on but they are not enough to ride us through its 158 minutes. With Moura’s convincing acting, Marcelo emerges as a powerful presence on screen, alternatively funny, charming and resolute. He seduces us into liking him, just as he does to most characters he meets, even the pitiful police chief. But with us not getting much granular details about his past, his motives and what makes him tick, he is not able to be at the center of a successful film. Without giving much content to his fleeing of repression, the stakes never quite become clear.
Filho’s talents are evident but The Secret Agent fails to find itself.
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