Wagner Moura in Intense Brazilian Thriller

An impressed streak of absurdism runs by The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) related to an city legend a couple of “furry leg” that strikes autonomously, inflicting bother within the northeastern Brazilian capital of Recife in 1977, when the nation remained beneath navy dictatorship. The leg turns up or is talked about numerous instances — being pulled from the messy guts of a giant shark carcass; stolen from the morgue and disposed of by evidence-tampering police; tagged because the offender in sensational tabloid crime tales; and actually kicking asses in a homosexual cruising floor, the place males are getting it on beneath bushes or on park benches.

The rogue limb is a intelligent metaphor for the regime’s persecution of the queer neighborhood, amongst different teams, together with dope-smokers, longhairs and anybody else who could be robotically branded as a communist. The complete scene is a superb comedian set-piece, beginning with the beautiful sight of chonky capybaras grazing in a area at evening earlier than shifting to the park, the place all that al fresco friskiness is rudely interrupted when the leg strides into motion.

It’s the sort of bizarro detour you don’t count on to absorb a interval political thriller centered on a widowed father whose life is in peril. However moments of anarchic humor amid real suspense are precisely the sort of factor that makes Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fourth narrative function such an exciting unique.

There’s additionally a conjoined-twins cat, with two faces on one physique; a girl experiencing demonic possession whereas being helped out of a movie show displaying The Omen; a much less perturbed gentleman on the identical screening getting a zesty blowjob in a again row whereas poor Lee Remick will get whacked by her Antichrist youngster; a child so obsessive about Jaws he has nightmares however is just too younger to see the 14-certificate launch; and a shark motif that even seems in an previous black-and-white Popeye episode.

Oh, did I point out it takes place throughout Carnival week, when revelers pack the streets by the lots of of hundreds and music saturates the air? However even that collective jubilation doesn’t escape the specter of mortality. A broadsheet headline late within the movie reads “Loss of life Toll of Carnival: 91,” because the pages are draped over the lifeless face of a contract killer in a pool of blood on a barbershop ground.

The magic of the movie is that each one these incongruous parts match organically into the bigger image, with out ever diluting the stress or undermining the life-and-death stakes for the central character, initially referred to as Marcelo. He’s performed with soulful eyes and a cloak of melancholy and harm by Walter Moura, in a stellar return to Brazilian cinema after a number of years away. He’s at all times been a superb actor, however Mendonça Filho makes him a film star.

Regardless of its humorous prospers and droll characters, The Secret Agent is a deeply severe film a couple of painful time in Brazil’s previous, when individuals had been disappeared in numerous numbers, employed assassins haggled over charges, and even far-flung cities the place the dictatorship was largely invisible felt its lengthy attain. It’s each of a bit with and fully completely different to Walter Salles’ Oscar winner from final 12 months, I’m Nonetheless Right here, the primary motion of which takes place in Rio at first of the ‘70s.

Mendonça Filho’s present for exploring Brazil’s advanced sociopolitical realities in idiosyncratic methods was already obvious in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, and particularly Bacarau, an anti-colonialist Western wherein UFOs hover over a distant village mysteriously wiped from the map. However this new function is his strongest but and deserves to raise him into the ranks of the world’s high modern filmmakers.

The earlier work that now feels virtually like a companion piece to The Secret Agent is the elegiac 2023 documentary Photos of Ghosts, concerning the director’s childhood dwelling in Recife and the now-vanished film palaces the place he discovered his calling. The seven years he spent making that movie whereas poring over metropolis archives is a big a part of the seed from which this new film sprouted.

It opens with Marcelo pulling in for gasoline in his yellow VW at a middle-of-nowhere station, the place he’s startled to see a lifeless physique mendacity on the gravel within the blazing solar, solely partly coated by a sheet of cardboard. He learns the person was shot by the night-shift attendant whereas trying to rob the place, and the police are too busy with Carnival to return, although the stench attracts wild canine.

However two cops do pull in, displaying little interest in the corpse. As a substitute, considered one of them does an in depth inspection of Marcelo’s paperwork and automotive, on the lookout for medicine, weapons or any sort of infraction. Discovering nothing, the cop places out his hand for a police fund donation.

That scene clues us in that Marcelo is already on the authorities’ radar. It additionally explains the urgency as soon as he arrives in Recife to get issues sorted and get out. The unofficial mayor of a tight-knit leftist neighborhood, 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, great), units him up in an house and gives an envelope full of money and particulars for a contact who might help facilitate pretend IDs for himself and his son.

Marcelo’s late spouse’s dad and mom have been caring for younger Fernando (Enzo Nunes) whereas he’s been away. His father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is considered one of a handful of disarming characters, together with voluble Dona Sebastiana (traditionally the patron saint of dying), who give the film a buoyancy that works in pretty counterpoint to the corrosive worry driving the plot. Alexandre works as a projectionist at one of many film palaces revisited in Photos of Ghosts; scenes within the sales space in addition to posters within the foyer and out of doors present a contemporary hit of the love for the moviegoing expertise that was so intoxicating within the doc.

Solely progressively does it grow to be clear that Marcelo (whose actual title is Armando) made an enemy of Ghirotti, a crooked federal official from Sao Paolo, who stripped public funding from the college analysis division he headed. He condescendingly tells Marcelo’s staff to deal with work extra in step with native enterprise issues, like tanning cow hides, and go away the delicate technological developments like lithium batteries to the extra superior specialists within the southern cities. Marcelo has already patented lithium batteries, which doesn’t go over effectively.

He manages to carry his tongue throughout an uncomfortable dinner wherein Ghirotti will get drunk and dismisses the Recife analysis staff’s work. However Marcelo’s spouse, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), lets unfastened with an indignant tirade that turns right into a bodily altercation. Marcelo has defined her dying to Fernando as the results of pneumonia, although the suspicion lingers that Ghirotti might need had her iced.

The a part of the film wherein Mendonça Filho jacks up the stress and will get to display razor-sharp style approach comes when Marcelo is anxiously awaiting his and Fernando’s pretend passports from a resistance facilitator referred to as Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), whereas two hitmen paid by Ghirotti, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobby (Gabriel Leone), arrive on the town to trace him down.

The prolonged sequence the place the killers get nearer and nearer to Marcelo is sort of Hitchcockian in its tightly wound dread, made extra agonizing by the raucous brass and drums of Carnival music. Maybe essentially the most daring trick Mendonça Filho pulls off is revealing the shut of Marcelo/Armando’s story by a present-day Sao Paolo researcher, Flavia (Laura Lufesi), who goes by audio tapes of bugged conversations and newspapers from the time to find what grew to become of him.

However moderately than dishonest us out of a satisfying conclusion, it cuts a path to a profoundly affecting one when Flavia travels to Recife to share her findings with the now grownup Fernando (additionally performed by Moura), who runs a blood financial institution. That medical facility occupies the spot of a phantom movie show.

Expertly chosen music offers a rhythmic pulse to a lot of the motion in a 2-hour-40-minute movie that by no means drags. The atmospheric rating by Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves has beautiful passages steeped in thriller and sorrow, mixed with an eclectic combine that ranges from the festive Carnival bands to worldwide hits like Chicago’s “If You Depart Me Now” and Donna Summer season’s “Love To Love You Child” to Brazilian songs of the interval, notably a swoony quantity that Marcelo performs on the stereo when he first settles into his Recife house, which amplifies the emotion of his hometown return.

Shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses within the barely saturated colours of movie inventory from the period, the film seems to be ravishing, each body filled with attention-grabbing particulars because of the knowledgeable manufacturing and costume design of Thales Junqueira and Rita Azevedo, respectively.

Enlivened by a populous, virtually Altman-esque gallery of characters — method too many to say — performed with out a single false notice, and by the sturdy sense of a neighborhood pulling collectively for security from the oppressive forces exterior, the film luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho’s intense love for the setting. It’s a serious achievement, and for my cash, certain to be top-of-the-line movies of the 12 months.