The Secret Agent

The title of Kleber Mendonca Filho's The Secret Agent cites the Conrad novel after which it is named. In the eponymous work, the main character is a rather ineffectual spy. The same tone of irony is at work in the current production. In the opening scene, a corpse is covered by cardboard, but when the police arrive, it's to shakedown the main character Armando (Wagner Moura). Lucky he has the required fire extinguisher in the glove compartment of his car. Armando's yellow beetle is an iconic presence in the film, a Beetles "Yellow Submarine" bobbing through an atmosphere of impending doom as the main character tries to skirt a pair of assassins during the l977 Brazilian Carnival in Recife. The atmosphere of joy, with masked revelers and public sex, alternates with constant fear and terror. Armando's father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is the projectionist in a theater where Jaws is being shown while Chicago's l976 hit "If You Leave Me Now" provides the soundtrack. Armando takes refuge in a safe house in Recife, but he's given a job in an agency which creates government identity cards and where he spends his free time searching for information about his late mother, who he barely remembers. Throughout the movie there are continual cuts to the present time in which, Flavia a researcher working to identify victims of past brutality, visits Armando's son Fernando, who works in a blood transfusion unit situated on the site of Sr. Alexandre's old movie theater. The film creates its own internal atmosphere which is timeless even as it moves from past to present. Industrial espionage and fascism bookend the action, but the style is one of cinematic magical realism in which history and memory create their own timeline and tapestry.