The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) evaluation
Forged: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Tânia Maria
Language: Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Star score: ★★★★.5
Some movies wish to get to the chase fairly upfront. There’s not a scene wasted. There’s a storytelling intrigue that dictates the pictures ahead. Then there comes a movie like The Secret Agent, from the thoughts of Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. A movie that begins with the breadcrumbs of intrigue—each political and private —after which slows down. Sharp but elusive, it’s a story that’s in no hurry to confront what lies forward. We count on to see it by hook or by crook. But, this sense of inevitability offers the movie a killer unpredictability.
The premise
We land in Brazil in 1977, launched as “a time of nice mischief.” A person’s corpse is rotting away close to a rural gasoline station the place Wagner Moura’s Armando pulls in his brilliant yellow VW Beetle. We all know nothing of him in these opening pictures, at the same time as he strikes into a brief setup, hosted by a 77-year-old lady in Recife named Dona Sebastiana (a scene-stealing flip from Tânia Maria).
It seems that he’s a widowed former instructor whose son, Fernando, is now residing together with his grandfather. Armando can also be awaiting directions as he takes up a job on the identification workplace, the place he searches for data that might hyperlink to his late mom. Within the meantime, two hitmen are employed to kill Armando. However there may be much more than meets the attention, as Armando will slowly know, as will we.
Assured and unpredictable
There’s an astonishing degree of confidence in the way in which Mendonça chooses to fill within the gaps of the story. The Secret Agent is a genre-shifting movie marked by zigzagging subplots and eccentric stylistic thrives. The extra you attempt to grasp it, the extra it eludes and teases you to comply with. And so, you concentrate, you look carefully, and fill within the particulars. It turns into Hitchcockian in its template of a thriller at instances, whereas I used to be additionally reminded of the slickness that’s so evident in Antonioni’s works.
This can be a movie that captures a time marked by worry and uncertainty, but additionally the sheer ridiculousness of all of it; the sweaty, worrisome exuberance in on a regular basis acts of corruption. The hattip to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and the way during which the morbid context is embedded into the story, is darkly comedian. But, The Secret Agent can also be about how we keep in mind the previous and select to outline it. Halfway by means of the story, the scene jumps to the current with Mendonça introducing two modern-day archivists. It doesn’t matter what they hear and the way they see the newspaper, the recorded historical past is sort of a scar, one that may solely be remembered like a hallucination.
A charming flip from Wagner Moura
Mendonça needs each the chaos and silence. Typically, these two parts conflict on this languid and nearly novelistic movie, which is held collectively by the magnetic presence of Wagner Moura. His efficiency is splendidly lived-in and intoxicating, drawing consideration merely with the slightest shift in his expression.
The Secret Agent might be like a dare, a movie of epic scale and ambition, a collection of shifts and revelations. It could actually additionally really feel like a bitter tablet of reality, one which balances moments of surprising depth, reminding us that historical past can by no means be encapsulated in a single, homogenous vessel. What an invigorating and transfixing movie Mendonça has made, one which bears witness in addition to data. It’s a main achievement.
The Secret Agent performed on the thirty first Kolkata Worldwide Movie Competition.