Old Yorker

O Agente Secreto

Kleber Mendonça Filho (2025)

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s first non-documentary feature, Neighbouring Sounds (2012), opened with a series of black-and-white photographs – ditto his fourth, The Secret Agent.  (I’ve not seen his intervening films, Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019).)  The photos’ significance seems different this time.  Neighbouring Sounds’ opening images are of individuals belonging to a rural Brazilian community sometime in the past, to a world far removed from that of the present-day big-city dwellers who people the film that follows; Mendonça will imply, even so, that the rustics somehow begat the urbanites.  In The Secret Agent, the photographs show Brazilians having fun, some in carnival costume, during the 1950s, and are accompanied by music of the same vintage (Waldir Calmon’s ‘Samba no Arpège’).  The montage, which also includes some black-and-white production stills, introduces a story set mostly in 1977, with a few scenes in something close to the present.  The stills predict the importance of contemporary movies in Mendonça’s narrative, but, for most of The Secret Agent, there’s no obvious connection between the Brazilians in monochrome and the dramatis personae.  By the end of this long (161 minutes) and unusual film, which he also wrote, Mendonça has made you think again.  The unknown people in the photos chime with what emerges as a main theme of The Secret Agent – how individual identities are defined or concealed, remembered or forgotten.

The action starts in February 1977 at an isolated roadside gas station.  Arriving there in his yellow VW Beetle, a driver is shocked to see a man’s body on the ground, the head and chest covered by a sheet of cardboard.  A pump attendant explains that the man was trying to rob the gas station and shot dead by another worker there.  This was a couple of days ago – the police have been contacted but they’re busy with carnival weekend.  The attendant’s chief concern is repeatedly having to shoo wild dogs away from the corpse.  A highway police car pulls into the gas station.  The crew show no interest in the dead body, but they do want to search the VW for drugs.  Failing to find anything, they ask the driver for a ‘donation’ to the police carnival fund.  After paying for petrol, the driver’s out of cash but he offers his remaining cigarettes to the policemen.  These are enough to send them on their way and allow the driver to resume his journey to Recife, Pernambuco – the city where Kleber Mendonça Filho was born and educated, and where (as in Neighbouring Sounds) the main action of The Secret Agent will take place.

The yellow VW driver is Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura), an ex-academic.  Since the death of Armando’s wife, their young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) has been cared for in Recife by his maternal grandparents, and that will continue even with Armando’s return to the city.  Although he’ll have some contact with Fernando, Armando will be working at the offices that house citizen records and issue identity cards.  He’ll be living in a refuge for political dissidents.  The refuge’s house mother is as-old-as-the-century Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a former anarcho-communist.  In both the safe house and the office, Armando will be known as Marcelo Alves.  A title card that appears on the screen with the first shots of the gas station describes 1977 as ‘a time of great mischief’.  Much later in the narrative, at a social gathering of her current guests, Dona Sebastiana proposes a toast to ‘a better Brazil, with less mischief’.  The ‘mischief’ is euphemistic code for the modus operandi of the country’s military dictatorship (which seized power in 1964 and held it until 1985).  Like Armando, most of his fellow lodgers chez Dona Sebastiana go under assumed names.  Dual identities there extend even to the old lady’s extraordinary pet – a Janus cat that, through congenital deformity, has conjoined heads on one body, and which startles Armando when he first sets eyes on them.  He can’t help laughing when Dona Sebastiana tells him that each head has a name – Liza and Elis – but the Janus cat serves as an ominous expression of the political deformity and duplicity of Brazil under the generals.

The freakish combination of Liza and Elis also anticipates more luridly horrific images in The Secret Agent.  A severed leg is found lodged in the gullet of a captured tiger shark:  at an oceanographer’s examination of the find, we’re introduced to Euclides (Robério Diógenes), Recife’s dishonest police chief, and his two dodgy sons, Arlindo (Italo Martins) and Sergio (Igor de Araújo).  There’ll be several exchanges between this trio and Armando, who’s angered when, at the identity card centre, Euclides harasses a German called Hans (Udo Kier), a Jewish concentration camp survivor, by accusing him of being a Nazi fugitive.  To try and prove otherwise, Hans reveals his dreadfully scarred upper body and legs – part of one of which is missing.  After Arlindo and Sergio have disposed of the severed leg in a river, it takes on a life of its own and, in the film’s most spectacular outburst of surreal horror, attacks gay men cruising at night in a park.  The limb thus becomes a media sensation – just as the military government intended.  The ‘hairy leg’, as it’s known in TV and press reports, is part of a kind of blood-and-circuses strategy, designed to deflect public attention from, for example, the death toll resulting from violence during the recent carnival[1].

Sharks, horror and nightmares are prominent, too, in The Secret Agent’s cinema strand.  Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) – Armando’s father-in-law and Fernando’s grandfather – is the projectionist at the Cinema São Luiz.  Fernando is obsessed with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Alexandre’s happy for him to see it.  Armando forbids this when he learns Fernando has had nightmares just from looking at the Jaws poster.  It’s in a room at the Cinema São Luiz that Armando has a secret meeting with Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) and Valdemar (Thomás Aquino), the leaders of an underground resistance network, working to protect political dissidents like Armando and which arranged his accommodation and employment in Recife.  Immediately before they meet him, Elza and Valdemar watch Richard Donner’s The Omen at the cinema:  Elza suggests that supernatural horror made an enjoyably scary change from the frightening reality of the military regime.  Denied the chance to watch Jaws, Fernando settles for a TV cartoon confrontation between a shark and Popeye.

That gas station prologue gets The Secret Agent off to an excellent start.  It’s a fine bit of black comedy, unhurried yet incisive in foreshadowing the prevailing violence and corruption of the world that Mendonça will go on to describe.  The prologue is followed by three distinct chapters – ‘The Boy’s Nightmare’, ‘Institutes of Identification’ and ‘Blood Transfusion’ – and, throughout the first two of them, the storytelling is rather baggy.  It’s never in doubt that Armando is the heart of the film – Wagner Moura’s quiet charisma sees to that – but Mendonça certainly takes his time clarifying his protagonist’s perilous position and the background to this.  The narrative takes a brief excursion to São Paolo, where two hitmen Augusto (Rony Vallely) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) are hired to kill Armando.  It’s not until his meeting with Elza and Valdemar, about halfway through the film, that Armando learns he’s a marked man, and is advised to flee the country as soon as the resistance outfit can supply him with a fake passport.  Armando also learns at this point who’s behind the planned contract killing.

This triggers a lengthy flashback to the encounters that resulted in Armando’s abiding hatred of Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), the man now planning his murder.  At the time, Armando was a senior electrical engineering researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco; as head of department, he hosted a visit from Ghirotti, a venal industrialist with links to the military dictatorship and who was much displeased by Armando’s patenting a form of lithium battery.  The visit includes increasingly fraught meetings at the university and culminates in a scene at a restaurant, where Armando, with his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho), has taken Ghirotti and his son to dine.  The Ghirottis, after disparaging Fátima’s humble origins, accuse her and Armando of communist sympathies.  The evening ends in a physical altercation, but the consequences of the visit are worse.  Through his contacts in high places, Ghirotti sees to it that Armando’s department loses its public funding and closes.  Although Fátima’s death was supposedly from pneumonia, it’s implied that Ghirotti may somehow have been responsible.

That remains no more than an implication; otherwise, Mendonça explains in extensive detail Ghirotti’s vendetta against Armando, and its aftermath.  In sometimes exasperating contrast, he skimps on other elements of the story – including the nature of Armando’s politically subversive activities.  We get the point, of course, that Armando is a principled and intelligent man unwilling to stick to the script the regime would have him follow, yet it’s hard to believe that every such individual in 1970s Brazil would be supported by resistance workers and treated as a political refugee.  I was never sure either why the corrupt Euclides, as soon as he meets Armando, also offers him protection – unless this is simply the arrogant police chief’s making a show of his authority.  Mendonça’s obliqueness can work well, though, as in, for example, his handling of Armando’s brief sexual relationship with Claudia (Hermila Guedes), another of Dona Sebastiana’s house guests.

The film’s tempo changes markedly – twice – in ‘Blood Transfusion’.  Evgenia Alexandrova’s cinematography often gives The Secret Agent the look of a standard-issue 1970s Hollywood thriller – the sort of thing the Cinema São Luiz might have shown when blockbusters like Jaws and The Omen weren’t around – and the bloodbath that occupies the first half of Mendonça’s third and last chapter evokes the same kind of movie.  Once hitman Bobbi gets on the trail of Alexandre, Armando’s cover is blown.  Augusto and Bobbi recruit Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio), a local man in need of funds, to find and kill Armando.  In a city-centre chase, Arlindo, a police colleague, Bobbi and Vilmar are all shot, three of them fatally – Vilmar’s the only one whom a blood transfusion might have helped.  Bobbi is killed in a barber’s shop; in an echo of the partly concealed corpse at the start, the barber places a newspaper over the dead man’s head.

Another sheet of newspaper then informs us of Armando’s death – an article accompanied by a photograph of his dead body.  Conveying this crucial news in an understated, matter-of-fact way, after the prolonged climactic violence that’s just gone before, is a highly effective touch on Mendonça’s part.  The following and final scenes of The Secret Agent connect the main story with the occasional modern-day scenes punctuating it.  In São Paolo, two history students, Flávia (Laura Lufési) and Daniela (Isadora Ruppert), have been researching 1970s news reports and the substantial audio archive of resistance leader Elza.  Whereas Daniela tends to watch something more entertaining on her computer screen whenever it suits, Flávia is highly committed to the work.   She learns that press reports of Armando’s death characterised him as ‘a corrupt professor’.  She also transcribes cassette tape recordings made by Elza, including the cinema interview with Armando.  After travelling to Recife, Flávia makes her way to a blood bank for a meeting with a doctor there.  She first gives blood then sits down to talk with the doctor, Fernando Solimões.

This time last year, another Brazilian film whose main story was set in the 1970s was enjoying deserved international success – Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here.  Salles’ (real-life) heroine, Eunice Paiva, was played through several decades of her life by Fernanda Torres and briefly, in very old age, by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro.  In The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura plays, as well as Armando, the latter’s middle-aged son and, as in I’m Still Here, the casting in the film’s epilogue is satisfying.  This is partly because Armando’s sudden departure from ‘his’ story, although his murder may be inevitable, isn’t emotionally easy for a viewer to accept.  Wagner Moura’s melancholy dignity gets under your skin (in a good way); it’s a kind of consolation to see him back on the screen.  There’s an echo of his father’s regretful presence in Moura’s Fernando, yet the conversation with Flávia also suggests discontinuity with the past.  Fernando was probably about nine years old in 1977, but he tells Flávia that he barely remembers his father.  It’s funny, as well as poignant, when Fernando adds that he happily recalls getting to see Jaws at the cinema with the grandfather that he came to see as a father.

Mendonça’s identity themes crystallise in this conversation.  While he’s working at the records office, Armando repeatedly searches files for the birth or death certificate of the mother he never knew.  His search is fruitless; Flávia, forty or more years later, has the means to find out more.  She’s able to tell Fernando that Armando’s mother was an indigenous woman known as India, probably a domestic worker for his paternal forebears, impregnated by Armando’s white father.  According to indifferent bureaucracy, India never existed; her son did exist but, on his death, his life was misrepresented by displeased officialdom.  In a hint that the film’s present-day Brazil may be during the Bolsonaro regime, Mendonça has Flávia tell Fernando that her university has ordered the research team to halt work and return audio and other archive, which may contain ‘sensitive information’.  Before doing so, Flávia copied Armando’s interview with Elza onto a USB stick, which she now hands across the table.  Fernando puts it in the pocket of his white coat.  Before they part company, he tells Flávia that the blood bank stands on the site of what was once the Cinema São Luiz.

As this coda got underway, I wondered if Mendonça needed it to prevent The Secret Agent ending up a bit of a political shaggy dog story.  Within a few minutes, I knew better.  The threads of amnesia and lost or obscured identity in Fernando and Flávia’s conversation keep calling to mind facets of the film you’ve been watching – you create your own flashback montage.  When Fernando says he doesn’t remember his father, you remember Armando’s reassuring his young son, still grieving for his mother, that Fátima was alive whenever they thought of her.  You recall what turned out to be Armando’s last evening in the refuge, when Dona Sebastiana addressed each of her guests by name – or in most cases, as she acknowledged, by pseudonym.  As Flávia passes Fernando the USB stick, you’re reminded that that recording of Armando’s interview with Elza at the cinema isn’t the whole story.  About to express his hatred of Henrique Ghirotti, Armando judiciously pressed the ‘stop’ button on the cassette recorder.  After telling Elza he’d willingly kill Ghirotti with a hammer, he pressed ‘record’ to resume his testimony.

You think also of the grainy black-and-white newspaper photo of Armando’s corpse – and all the way back to those other nameless people in the black-and-white montage at the very start of Mendonça’s film.  His occasionally discursive, occasionally cryptic narrative can make you feel you don’t quite get the hang of what he’s trying to do – a feeling that, at last, almost seems congruent with his reflections on identity, on how and why it can be hard to know who someone is, or was.  Those reflections may be enriched, for audiences outside South America at least, by the unfamiliarity of nearly all the cast.  Except for Udo Kier (whose final film this was:  he died last November), I didn’t recognise anyone – even Wagner Moura, though I recognised the name (Moura is probably best known internationally for his lead role in the TV series Narcos).  And although The Secret Agent includes an amazing range of camera subjects, I know I’m likely to forget most of them quite soon.  Amnesiac cinemagoers have something in common with repressive political regimes:  both are liable to accumulate countless numbers of ‘the disappeared’.  Though I think I’ll remember Tânia Maria, who’s so remarkable as shrunken, indomitable Dona Sebastiana.

Mendonça’s apparently unoriginal, almost generic title is interesting.  I don’t know if he means to reference Joseph Conrad or Alfred Hitchcock; what is certain is that Armando Solimões, aka Marcelo Alves, is far removed from the usual special agents of the cinema screen.  Mendonça confirms this, almost as an aside, when a trailer for Philippe de Broca’s Le Magnifique (1973), an espionage spoof comedy, is visible in the background of a scene in Alexandre’s projectionist’s booth.  Le Magnifique stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a struggling writer of pulp spy novels, who imagines himself as the glamorous superspy of his fictional creations – the polar opposite, in other words, of Armando, a secret agent in the fact that he really is forced to live and take action in secret.

24 February 2026

[1] It seems that Brazilian audiences of Mendonça’s generation will know that the ‘hairy leg’ means something else, though.  As he recently explained to Screen Daily:  ‘Recife is a very left-leaning city, irreverent, carnival is anarchic, it’s interesting from the point of view of cultural production, music, theatre, literature.  But in the ’70s, the press was dealing with censorship and some themes were forbidden, particularly violence from the army, the police and the military police.  So, when something happened, it wasn’t reported.  Then, two journalists came up with the idea of a “hairy leg”.  It was basically code for the police beating the shit out of people at night. These were usually bohemians. Maybe they looked like thieves. Maybe they were people from the gay community. Particularly in the parks, they took a beating.’