The secret agent: a poetic and political (critical) genre film
In the Recife crushed by the 1977 dictatorship, a hunted man seeks the trace of his missing mother. Between sensory thriller and meditation on confiscated history, Mendonça Filho transforms nostalgia into an act of resistance. A film carried by the magnetic intensity of Wagner Moura.
It is a sensory vortex that grabs the spectator from the first images. Recife, 1977, the atmosphere is oppressive. Brazil suffocates under the military dictatorship. The heat is unbearable. A yellow ladybug goes through the desert and stops at a rotten service station. A corpse lies in front of the pumps and cops in a patrol car get involved … It feels like a peckinpah first. The car passenger, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), flees north. It is an assumed name. A university scientist or a political dissident? The borders very quickly fade like sweat on the bodies. And when you discover his goal – to find his son and recover the only proof of existence of his missing mother – the mystery is only thicken.
It is one of the great pleasures of The secret agent: The film progresses immediately by jerks. Sudden. Unpredictable. And it will take time to pick up the pieces, as if Mendonça advanced over the reconstituted memory of this story … but the immersion in Brazil 70s is total. Vintage cars, vinyl records, parts, craft printing presses. The collective memory intertwines to the intimate in this film which, from the start, will refuse the conventions of the genre to better resuscitate an engulfed era always haunting the present. It is a genre film therefore, but a mental film too, a quest, and in the midst of this kaleidoscope, opposing consciousness to blindness, transmission to ignorance, the honest face of Wagner Moura even tips the epic towards the political manifesto.
However, do not be mistaken – if it was really necessary to categorize this thriller, so we could say that it is above all a poetic meditation. On the tremors of memory in the face of the ravages of the dictatorship. Mendonça’s camera Filho caresses each corner of Recife as we touch a barely healed injury. The plans and the sequences are linked into haunting fragments which resist erasure. It is the film project on the background. Filming forgetting, looking for the absent, recalling what disappeared and that is what this striking moment says when a Jewish tailor (the essential Udo Kier) reveals the indelible marks that war has engraved on his skin. Mendonça therefore chose: against institutionalized amnesia, only art can rebuild the soul of an amputated country. Tropicália music floods the soundtrack and copiously cited cinema, are not simple ornaments – these are declarations that defy censorship.
And at the heart of this rebellious journey, there is Wagner Moura who delivers an incredible performance. The actor of Narcos Completely disappears behind this man with moving identities, giving Marcelo a magnetic presence where the slightest micro-expression tells the story of his country. His eyes, sometimes vigilant, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes raging, become the mirror of a fractured Brazil. Even more impressive, he embodies a character in the contemporary part of the story, thus creating a poignant continuity between the eras – as if the national pain flowed silently in the veins of successive generations.
Finally, impossible not to think of the beautiful film by Walter Salles, I’m still there. Released a few months ago, he headed political abductions head -on. But Mendonça Filho chose a more oblique approach. More fun and more nebulous. He diverts the codes of the genre film to better question the erasure of the traces and his history to him is dotted with obstinate evidence, which refuse to disappear. This is what justifies time jumps between 1977 and our present – where two students transcribe old cassettes related to the case. These round trips weave a fascinating dialogue between eras. And nostalgia then becomes an ultimate act of resistance.
