Wagner Moura Mourns Lost Identities in 'The Secret Agent'

“Brazil, 1977. A time of great mischief.”

This "mischief" ("pirraça" in Portuguese), proclaimed by an opening title card in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sixth feature, is a bitterly ironic reference to the U.S.-backed military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. On the run from the repressive regime, Armando (Wagner Moura) returns to his hometown city of Recife. There, sheltered alongside other political refugees, he attempts to reunite with his son and find a way to escape the country.

The Secret Agent is a textured, expansive thriller about memory. Any commentary on it should begin with its ravishing ‘70s look. The vivid colors and detailed production design, captured by the Panavision anamorphic lenses, are not just a surface-level achievement; they reflect the way its scarred characters grasp for the past while trying to escape their present.

Kleber isn't subtle about drawing parallels between dictatorship-era paranoia and the moronic present-day red scare that lumps together artists, activists, educators and anyone else deemed a "collaborator" – the thoughtful class is forced to become a web of secret agents as they are persecuted in the name of the country. However, the scope of dramatic interest is broadened far beyond the strictly political front and national borders.

The film's ensemble is a mosaic of loss. In addition to its refugees, which include an Angolan couple fleeing a civil war, a teen kicked out for not being the “right kind of man”, a single mother, and a Holocaust survivor, there are others adrift. We also follow a kid navigating the loss of a parent, Moura’s protagonist seeking out hard proof of his late mother’s existence, and the spirited haven host covertly grieving her niece. Although their issues are distinct, an overwhelming sentiment of absence unites them – the kind that not even others’ knowing sympathy or the hope for a better future can alleviate.

Invoking Pictures of Ghosts (KMF’s essayistic archive documentary that mourns the death of downtown Recife’s old theaters), the film’s frequent incorporation of newspapers, tape recordings, letters, photographs and government documents – as well as its use of Cinema São Luiz as a key setting – lays out the trail of archival sources that can be unearthed to tell meaningful stories, but it also exposes the tragic impossibility of returning to what’s been lost.

Nine times out of 10, the lack of an emphatic conclusion after such a careful and effective slow burn would be frustrating. But here, the time-skipping ending that trades the catharsis of stylized violence for the cold passivity of a footnote is fitting for what the movie is getting at. It’s an uncomfortable conclusion that highlights how fiction's sentiment and morality are dwarfed by the enforcement of oblivion.

-Raul