Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret
Agent is essential viewing for cinephiles, globalists, social justice warriors,
and, well, anybody who loves human beings.
The film is a slow-burn, with a deliberate and strategic pace that reflects
Filho's background as a journalist. His camera is steady and patient, and true
to the thriller genre, dread lurks just outside of each frame.
In the first minutes of the film, Filho shows us Brazil in the '70s, a violent
and corrupt place, where corpses lie in the sun for days, drawing vermin but no
police.
Golden Globe-winner Wagner Moura (Narco) plays Marcelo, a Brazilian man who
takes shelter in a refugee lodge in his hometown of Recife, Pernambuco, for
reasons that become clearer as the story unfolds.
Before we even know why, we learn Marcelo's young son (Enzo Nunes) is being
reared by the boy's grandparents, cinema operator Alexandre and his wife,
Lenira (Carlos Francisco and Aline Marta Maia). Marcelo sees his son and
promises they will be living together soon. (One of the more endearing scenes
in the entire picture, which is at points violent, grisly and forbidding.)
Marcelo, whose real name is Armand, gets help from a member of the resistance
underground (Buda Lira) in landing a position in the office that issues state
IDs. It is there Marcelo looks for papers about his birth mother and meets with
other members of the resistance to get passports for him and his son.
In the meantime, assassins have been contracted by a murderous and vengeful industrialist
(Luciano Chirolli) to find Armand and silence him. Once that is revealed, the
picture becomes a race, the story driven by uncertainty of who will succeed.
Along the way, we see the faces and hear the voices of castoffs trying to find
safety in the open, a condition that until then has eluded them. I trust some
American audiences will find haunting parallels between these displaced people,
the political corruption and law enforcement abuses in 1977 Brazil and the
state of affairs in the U.S. today.
No comments:
Post a Comment