The bodies of innocent citizens don’t stay buried, or submerged, for long in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Corruption in 1970s Brazil saturates the bodies and souls of politicians, police officers, the media and industrialists.
In the world Filho constructs, moral ambiguity doesn’t exist. Everyone is complicit. The chief of police’s henchmen are his sons. But he’s not torn about the example he’s setting. They carry out his orders without questioning him. Callous self-interest is their true inheritance. A rotted-out spiritual capital gets handed down from generation to generation. They’re part of an expansive network of everyday villains who get their thrills from hunting down liberal do-gooders. Kidnapping, murder, extortion: it’s all part of the sadistic fun taking place under a dictatorship.
Marcelo (Wagner Moura) is the sad-eyed hero of the film. He’s introduced to viewers on his way to find refuge in the seaside city of Recife. It’s one of those films where the ocean isn’t recreational; it’s a safe harbor for sharks. When he pauses to fill up his gas tank, the camera, taking up his point of view, zooms in on the dusty ground where a corpse is clumsily wrapped in newspapers and cardboard. The station attendant tells him they reported it to the police but several days have passed without any response from the authorities.
While Marcelo is processing this information, two highway patrol officers pull up to the station. At first, their arrival suggests they’ve responded to the call. Marcelo knows better. Neither officer is interested in the dead body but one of them makes a beeline toward him. Marcelo’s defensive posture indicates a wariness. He understands he’s about to get interrogated. He gives careful, measured responses knowing that, at the end of the interview, he’ll have to bribe the officer to avoid being beaten or taken into custody. He can’t afford to take any risks.
After the encounter, he drives toward the city center. Carnival dancers on the side of the road seem to herald his arrival. But one of them, dressed up as a red bird in full plumage, sticks his head inside Marcelo’s car as if to threaten him. It’s not a good sign. These first ten minutes of The Secret Agent are a harbinger of what’s to come.
One Battle After Another is, stylistically, the American equivalent of Filho’s film. Both evoke an earlier, looser era of filmmaking, one that Peter Biskind documented in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Paul Thomas Anderson and Filho have made overtly political movies. But they’re also entertainments, the ideas acted out by several characters who, along with their competing ideologies, inevitably collide. One Battle relies on Leonardo DiCaprio to communicate a generation’s anxiety about the state of class and race relations in America—where one’s personal life must be compartmentalized separately and away from one’s political life. The two cannot coexist in this country without some aspect of the self surrendering to a moral breakdown.
Anderson presents a bleak picture of the current moment but he also retains a sense of hopefulness. Filho, a realist, does not. Marcelo, whose real name is Armando, is impassively resigned to his fate. He and a group of political exiles are resisting the State’s greedy and punitive reach. But he doesn’t seem to feel the same sense of urgency as Bob, DiCaprio’s character, does. Both are essentially widowers, single fathers trying to claim and protect their children in the midst of many other equally pressing dilemmas.
There are multiple differences between these two characters on the run but they boil down to psychology, the time periods and the geographical settings. Bob is a true paranoid who suffers from justifiable paranoia. He participated in what the government would describe as domestic terrorist activities. But he also came of age in a post-Nixon era. His mind is overwrought because he intuits that, eventually, the State will catch up with him. No amount of vaping will help him avoid the long arm of the law.
Before he adopted the Marcelo pseudonym, as Armando he worked in academia. At that time in Brazil after the military coup, his profession was considered subversive. He remains quizzical, and in disbelief that he and his ideals are being forced to flee the country (the historian Mark Bray might identify with Armando’s plight). Where Bob is a comic figure—bumbling, unconscious, naive—Armando is tragically laconic. He can’t form the thoughts or find the words to defend himself. Armando enters the gates of Hell thinking it’s a path toward salvation. That plan works for Bob in a cinematic universe defined by happier endings. The Secret Agent takes place in another country, a wiser, more rueful one.
The Secret Agent is now playing at the AMC Saratoga in San Jose.
