The Secret Agent: Left Out of History

Aside from the 1980-set prologue of his second feature, Aquarius (2016), this is Mendonça Filho’s first period piece, and he revels in the textures and details—the fashion, music, cars, and other trappings—of the late seventies, summoned as if from sense memories. (Born in 1968, he would have been Fernando’s age in 1977.) He also incorporates some of the era’s cinematic language, deploying split screens, wipe transitions, zooms, and split diopter shots that toy with depth of field. Shooting with vintage anamorphic lenses, Mendonça Filho and his cinematographer, Evgenia Alexandrova, opted for a brightly saturated palette to capture the sun-drenched vibrancy of Brazil during Carnaval. But about forty-five minutes in, a disorienting cut throws us into the present day—one immediate clue is a glimpse of an iPhone’s cold, flat hardness. This is the film’s boldest gambit, a flash-forward that reframes everything that precedes and follows. The flesh-and-blood people we have encountered are suddenly voices on tape, their accounts of persecution and resistance being transcribed by a couple of young researchers. Mendonça Filho returns us promptly to the Recife of February 1977, but we are now acutely aware that we are watching a fragment of history, one likely to have remained dormant had no one undertaken the work of remembering and preserving it.

The cassette tapes, part of a documentation project that Elza undertakes to counter misinformation and censorship, are totemic objects in The Secret Agent. They activate a form of time travel, embodying—as Mendonça Filho puts it—“the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.” One locus of that future is our here and now. Circulating between past and present, The Secret Agent is a rebuke to the historical amnesia and revisionism that has been a recent feature of Brazilian life, reaching its peak during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right populist regime. Outspoken critics of their country’s creeping authoritarianism, both Mendonça Filho and Moura were frequent targets of right-wing media during the Bolsonaro years, which saw a backsliding in Brazil’s troubled relationship with the crimes of the military regime. Forgetfulness was encouraged—as in Bolsonaro’s notorious remark that “those that look for bones are dogs”—and the brutal actions of the dictatorship justified and even celebrated.

It is significant that Armando, despite what the film’s title suggests, is not an enemy of the state but an ordinary citizen whose downfall begins when he crosses the wrong person. His plight owes to a pervasive confluence of corruption, cruelty, and impunity that is no less present today, in any number of authoritarian-leaning societies far beyond Brazil. Seen in flashback, Armando is a long-haired academic who heads his university’s engineering department. He plays host to Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), an executive from the then-state-owned utility company Eletrobras, who arrives dripping condescension for what he deems the provincial North and sets about defunding the research activities of Armando’s team. The scenes in which Armando and his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), stand up to the sneering intimidation of Ghirotti and his goonish son bristle with the righteous anger that is an underremarked signature of Mendonça Filho’s. It makes sense that a body of work so attuned to the extreme divides of class and race in Brazilian society would find room for some memorably powerful explosions of fury: the cathartic uprising of the besieged townspeople in Bacurau (2019) and the stubborn crusade of Sônia Braga’s character against ruthless real-estate developers in Aquarius come to mind.

But the Mendonça Filho film that The Secret Agent most recalls—and that qualifies in fact as a companion piece—is 2023’s Pictures of Ghosts. A capacious essay about its maker’s actual and spiritual homes in Recife—the family apartment that served as a film set for his early endeavors, the movie palaces of the once vibrant downtown, where he cultivated his youthful cinephilia—that documentary also contains what we might take as The Secret Agent’s statement of purpose. Interviewed in a television clip, Mendonça Filho’s late mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian, describes oral history as the work of collecting information that has been “left out of history.”

Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent go about that work assiduously, hopeful that what has been cast aside may yet be rediscovered and reclaimed. Both films remind us that cinema is itself an archive and a time machine. Marquees and posters double as timepieces. Fiction movies contain documentary traces of their day, and in an era when cinema was a popular art nonpareil, films could shape the dream life of a populace. Jaws, still playing in theaters over a year after its release, is a recurring specter in The Secret Agent: mirrored in the tabloid headlines about the shark that washed ashore with that human leg in its stomach, and an obsession of the young movie buff Fernando, who has not yet been granted permission to see it. The Cinema São Luiz, one of the venerable single-screen theaters that Mendonça Filho consecrates in Pictures of Ghosts, is a critical location in The Secret Agent. It is where Armando’s father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), works as a projectionist (the character is named for and modeled on an old friend of Mendonça Filho’s who makes a lasting impression in Pictures of Ghosts), and it is also where Elza records Armando’s testimony for posterity.

A film of continual surprise, The Secret Agent keeps things off balance through its extraordinary final passages. It is here that we fully grasp that Mendonça Filho’s narrative and formal choices are inseparable from his ethical and political considerations. As Carnaval heats up, the walls close in on Armando. Most other movies would have positioned his doom as the narrative’s tragic climax, but Mendonça Filho handles it with astonishing understatement. Armando’s killing takes place offscreen: an act of mercy and a principled refusal of spectacle, but also a gut punch in its brute finality. Flávia (Laura Lufési), one of the students listening to Elza’s tapes in the present, learns what happened to Armando from a newspaper scan: the item includes the false charge of corruption that dogged him after his entanglement with Ghirotti, and a blurred photo of his body in the street. Time turns lives into footnotes, if it does not erase them completely. Our hero is but one of countless pointless casualties of the dictatorship and its miasma of depravity.

Mendonça Filho concludes the film in our unsteady present. Echoing the fate of Armando’s engineering lab decades earlier, the university pulls the plug on Flávia’s research project, wary of sensitive information coming to light. Unable to shake Armando’s story, she seeks out his son, the now middle-aged Fernando, who works as a doctor at a blood bank in Recife. (Moura, with cropped hair, also plays this role.) There is an important revelation in their exchange; Fernando shares what little he knows about Armando: that he was the product of a liaison between a seventeen-year-old boy and the fourteen-year-old daughter of his family’s Indigenous housekeeper, and that he had little contact with his mother. Fernando, with visible discomfort, describes the grandmother he never knew as “an enslaved person.” Accordingly, there was no trace of her in the registry office when the adult Armando went looking. Mendonça Filho has never shied from examining the persistent scars of his country’s colonial past—this was already evident in his first feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), which acknowledged Recife’s history as a city built on sugar plantations and slave labor. The dictatorship, as the potent coda of The Secret Agent makes clear, is hardly Brazil’s only unresolved trauma.

The analog tapes that are records of Armando’s existence—that prove he lived—are back in the possession of those who would prefer to suppress their contents, but Flávia has copied them onto a flash drive for Fernando. He barely remembers his father and doesn’t seem keen to delve into the past, but he accepts her gift. As the film ends, the drive sits in the pocket of Fernando’s lab coat, a latent archive that awaits, perhaps, a listener in the future.