unintentional revolutionaries
by Douglas Messerli
Kleber Mendonça Filho (screenwriter and director) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) / 2025
By far one of the very best films, if not the best
of 2025 was Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Although Kleber
Mendonça Filho cited a slew of films as influence, including John Boorman's Point
Blank (1967), Karel Kachyňa's The Ear (1970), Elio Petri's Investigation
of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna's Iracema
(1974), Héctor Babenco's Lúcio Flávio (1977), Steven Spielberg's Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Eduardo Coutinho's Twenty Years
Later (1984), to me the film closest in style and impact is Costa-Gavras’
1969 movie Z, a political thriller like The Secret Agent that has
far more real human political consequences than the science fiction fantasy
world of Close Encounters or Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which
threads a path through Mendonça Filho’s work through our hero, Armando Solimões’
(Wagner Moura) life. His young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) is fascinated by the
imagery of the poster; and events surrounding a shark discovered with a human leg
in its mouth, weave their way through a journalistic trope about the murder and
harassment of gay men enjoying sex in a local public park.
The time is 1977, in the midst of the
Brazilian military dictatorship when the government is run more like a mafia
that controls through murder and threats. Armando, a former university
researcher who as chair of his department has openly offended the former Eletrobras
executive director Henrique Ghirotti who has come to close down his active
research department, planning to pick of various faculty members for his own
organization and to delete any possible forms of competition. He is a brutally
rude individual who, the night before his meeting with the faculty, at a dinner party offends
Armando and his wife Fátima
Nascimento (Alice Carvalho), who is a teacher, by referring to
her as his secretary and treating her as if she were chattel. Before the
evening is over, she speaks out vehemently against Ghirotti’s behavior and the
night ends with the usually unaggressive Armando slugging out the executive.
Fatima,
Armando’s wife dies soon after, presumably of pneumonia; but we wouldn’t be
surprised if she were, like Armando, quickly put on a government hit list and killed
We are,
as the written narrative reports—in a vast understatement—in a time of mischief.
To protect
his identity, Armando’s name has been changed to Marcelo Alves. An entire film might have been made focusing simply on these
remarkably frightened but brave individuals, all unique human beings worth more
attention than this movie has to give them. And their one group meeting when
several admit their real names and the Angolan couple give away their secret
about fleeing soon to Sweden, is one of the most moving scenes in the film.
The sons
are later instructed to steal the leg and toss it back into the dark waters,
which becomes the subject of later newspaper sensationalist folklore when it supposedly attacks the gay men and female prostitutes openly engaging in sex in the local park, killing numerous of them. The strange
story of the “hairy leg” is based on real incidents in the late 1970s,
according to Globo.com, written about in the Pernambuco Daily (Diário
de Pernambuco) which allowed the press to disguise censored news about
police violence, corruption, and homophobia that took place in the Brazilian
Military Dictatorship. Daily reports of the return of “the hairy leg” revealed
bodies and sometimes names of victims who might otherwise have gone
unrecognized.
We soon also discover that also in Recife live
Armando/Marcelo’s father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) and his wife’s
mother who are looking after our hero's young son Fernando, whom Armando hopes
to take with him when he escapes. It is the boy who is fixated on the film Jaws
even though Armando and Sr. Alexandre, who works as a projectionist at the
city’s major art film theater the Cinema São Luiz, do not
think that the dream-ridden boy should be subjected to given violent images that the film presents. But as we later discover at the end of this work, once his
grandfather actually allows him to see the film, his nightmares come to an end.
The truth (at least as presented in art) is obviously the solvent to many of
our internal fears, a theme that is also explored throughout this movie.
Meanwhile, the underground group of Recife arrange for Armando/Marcelo to be
employed in the Institute for Identification where he often gets an upfront
seat on police investigations and where he can peruse the archives to find more
information about his mother, who was evidently married by his father when she
was a 14-year old servant, an example of the racial inequalities that still
exist in Brazil today and are often referenced in Mendonça Filho’s films.
From the beginning Police Chief Euclides, probably
simply to keep a close eye on him, offers Marcelo his protection, insisting he
join him and his son on a visit to a local tailor Hans (Udo Kier in his last
cinema role) who, because he speaks German, Euclides is convinced must have
been a German war soldier, forcing him, despite Hans’ retreat to a back room,
to show him his scarred legs and chest as he and his sons laugh; in actually,
as Armando/Marcelo perceives, Hans is a German Jew who has suffered in the
camps during the Holocaust. Our hero, accordingly, gets a clear view of just how
ugly and bigoted Recife’s city police have become.
Another
theme in this director’s works of cinema is the split in cultures between southern
Brazil where sit the major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and the north
where Recife and other major cities are located. The urban coastal south, the center of
Brazilian culture and industry, looks down at the more agriculturally dependent
north, another theme played out in this and other works by the same director.
So it is
with a sense of slight fracture that the film suddenly presents us with a scene
in São Paulo where the vengeful now former Eletrobras executive Ghirotti calls
on two guns for hire, Augusto Borba (Roney Villela) and his nephew Bobbi (Gabriel
Leone). Ghirotti wants Armando/Marcelo not only killed but with a hole in his
mouth, obviously a punishment for his speaking out against his dissolution of
the important research group of Pernambuco.
After a scene of a brutal murder they have
committed, the body of which they also dispose of into a river, we are quickly
returned to Recife where in a secret meeting at the Cinema São Luiz,
Armando/Marcelo meets up with one of the leaders of the underground group, Elza
(Maria Fernanda Cândido) who asks him to tape his history, particularly the scene with Ghirotti, and sadly must tell Armando that he is now on a death
list and must leave as soon as possible; but since his own passport will reveal
his identity, he must wait for 4 more days for a forged document.
Suddenly,
with horrific speed, the formerly slow-moving film tumbles into a series of
quick events as Augusto and Bobbi arrive in Recife and hire a local gunman
Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) to track down Armando/Marcelo and carry out the brutal
vendetta.
It is in
these last scenes of the film where Armando finally lets himself be momentarily
swept up by the Carnival that has been going on through most of the film,
and during which hundreds of people have been murdered, many of them by the
police themselves, as we have already witnessed in the “hairy leg murders” tales.
It is in
this context that our hero also meets up with his fellow “refugees,” the group
basically saying goodbye to one another, with Dona Sebastiana recalling her
early days in Italy when she first became a kind of "unintentional
revolutionary."
Vilmar,
through bribes of the second projectionist at the famed art theater is able to
track down Sr. Alexandre, and through a letter he has left in his office desk,
the current address of Armando, whom he finally tracks down to the Institute
for Identification where he now pretends to work.
Vilmar,
moreover, is being tracked by Bobbi, just to make certain that he accomplishes
the task.
When Armando spots Vilmar at his offices, he finally
is forced to take up the offer of protection Police Chief Euclides, who,
despite is own murderous actions, appears to be suspicious of the visit of
Southern hitmen such as Augusto and Bobbi, whom they quite literally take “for
a ride,” making it clear that they are not appreciated in Recife, and probably behind the reason the two have hired a local to actually commit the act.
Armando
demands Euclides protect him, having witnessed, he argues, a man harassing others
in his office. Euclides sends his son Arlindo and another “soldier,” to checkout
Vilmar. The moment they confront them, he shoots them both several times,
killing Arlindo, the other wounding Vilmar before he too dies in the street, a
police car quickly arriving to scoop up their bodies, two more men having died
mysterious deaths whose cause will never be revealed.
Bobbi,
still on Vilmar’s track follows the trail of his blood to a barbershop, which
when he enters he discovers to be empty. From behind Vilmar shoots him dead,
before he escapes.
Certainly, this is perhaps almost too much plot to even assimilate, but necessary, I argue, to explain fully what this thriller is all about.
Throughout, moreover, there
have been two other scenes that seem almost inexplicable until, once again, the
events are interlinked with the larger plot. Two women are listening to tapes—the ones we have
earlier seen Elza record in Cinema São Luiz while interviewing Armando. These
woman, who soon discern, exist in the present day, are transcribing the tapes of
the underground during the dictatorship. One in particular, Lenira Nascimento (Aline
Marta Maia) is deeply moved by Armando’s voice and his story about his
encounters with Ghirotti, whose horrific acts have turned his normal life into
a hell.
Even
here, however, we learn that the tapes are now being recalled back to
headquarters since they have been discovered perhaps to contain sensitive
information. Was this, we can only ask, in the days Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023),
calling back all attempts to actually discover past truths like the current US
president, Donald Trump?
No
matter, Lenira has secretly recorded the tapes, herself becoming part of an
underground of information. She makes an appointment with Fernando, Armando Solimões’
son (also played by Wagner Moura). A middle-age doctor in a blood-bank,
formerly the very theater in which he finally saw Jaws, he seems under-whelmed
by any news of his father’s death, which we now know was a murder that happened
even despite the momentary escape we witness in the film. He remembers
absolutely nothing about his father, even though his grandfather has long
reminded him of how he dressed and waited for his appearance to take him away.
Regarding his grandmother, who Armando had so desperately sought to learn more about, the
older Fernando is convinced it was simply a marriage of servitude, but has
since learned that they named her “India” and even described his father as sometimes being addressed
by the same name. But he seems totally disinterested in history. Has he too
become a kind of vampire, demanding Lenira donate blood before he will even speak
with her?
The researcher, an ironic designation since
Armando was once described just as that, still insists, despite the fact that Fernando may find it difficult to hear, that he might wish to listen to them; handing him a stick disk of the illegally saved tapes. Fernando finally puts it in his pocket as she leaves him, she explaining
that although she came all the way from São Paulo to communicate with him, she
does also have family here which she will now be able to visit. Her last name
being Nascimento it is highly likely that she may be related to Armando’s now
dead wife, Fernando’s forgotten mother. But alas they may never come to realize
that fact, just as, sadly, he may never choose to listen to his father’s voice
from the past, the story we, the audience, have just so passionately suffered
through.
Yet
finally we realize that it is not Armando or any of his cohorts, but this young
woman who is the secret agent, the one able to provide the following generation
with a history that might help them to remember and heal without her even
knowing of her agency, her role in other’s lives.
Time has way of erasing the horrible events of
the past, which why later generations keep repeating the former's behavior, generation after generation
making the same mistakes again and again: the lack of human understanding and
compassion, the support of leaders who care more for their own power and
enrichment than the betterment of the citizens they are supposed to lead.
This film
was written for our times.
Los Angeles, March 12, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March
2026).
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