The Secret Agent, <\/em>the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil\u2019s northeast. It\u2019s Carnaval 1977, \u201cuma \u00e9poca cheia de pirra\u00e7a<\/em>\u201d\u2014a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country\u2019s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.<\/p>\n A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn\u2019t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. \u201cI\u2019m almost getting used to this shit,\u201d he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The Secret Agent, <\/em>the latest feature by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho, opens on a desolate, sun-soaked gas station outside Recife, a bustling coastal metropolis in Brazil\u2019s northeast. It\u2019s Carnaval 1977, \u201cuma \u00e9poca cheia de pirra\u00e7a<\/em>\u201d\u2014a time of mischief, the subtitles tell us. For those familiar with Brazilian history, this places us roughly halfway through the country\u2019s 21-year military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A man from out of town pulls up in a candy-yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the backseat loaded with boxes and suitcases. After parking, he notices something disturbing: a human corpse, barely covered by sheets of cardboard, rotting in the summer sun. A would-be thief, the station attendant explains, shot dead by his co-worker. With Carnaval festivities underway, he doesn\u2019t expect the police to show up until Ash Wednesday. \u201cI\u2019m almost getting used to this shit,\u201d he complains affably while wiping down the windshield.<\/p>\n Just as the stranger\u2014played by Wagner Moura (a Brazilian superstar best known to U.S. audiences, unfortunately, for his sad-sack Pablo Escobar in Netflix\u2019s Narcos<\/em>)\u2014is about to leave, a pair of cops shows up. They are oblivious to the body; their real purpose is to size up the out-of-towner.<\/p>\n This opening scene lasts 15 minutes and offers little in the way of exposition or payoff. The cops take off after claiming a paltry bribe; the fate of the dead thief is never resolved. Yet the scene sets the tone for the rest of the film, whose languid, painterly style allows Mendon\u00e7a Filho to offer up a series of canny observations on life under, and after, authoritarianism. The theft, the murder, the looking away; a useless investigation that disappears when a bribe is paid; and, at the edge of the screen, a stinking corpse that everyone involved would rather ignore.<\/p>\n The opening scene from The Secret Agent<\/i>.IMDB<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1964, Brazil\u2019s generals\u2014with backing from the U.S. State Department\u2014overthrew the democratically elected government of President Jo\u00e3o Goulart. Like the dictatorships in neighboring Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Brazil\u2019s ditadura <\/em>was marked by censorship and the repression of labor unions and left-leaning political parties\u2014not to mention the kidnapping, torture, murder, and disappearances of its real and perceived ideological enemies. In 2014, a National Truth Commission revealed<\/a> that tens of thousands of Brazilians were detained and tortured during the dictatorship, with at least 434 murdered or disappeared.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Still, in recent years, right-wing movements across South America have made dictatorship apologia part of their pitch to voters. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting to dispatch the military in his quest to overturn the results of the 2022 election. During his trial, he defended<\/a> his actions in part by citing a common right-wing line of reasoning that the architects of the 1964 coup were the saviors of a nation threatened by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Current Argentine President Javier Milei has trolled the post-dictatorship slogan \u201cmemory, truth and justice\u201d by amplifying calls<\/a> for a \u201ccomplete memory\u201d: one that turns its attention away from the regime\u2019s crimes and toward the kidnappings and assassinations committed by left-wing guerrillas. Meanwhile, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Kast, Chile\u2019s recently elected president<\/a>, first forayed<\/a> into politics as an organizer of the \u201cyes\u201d campaign for the 1988 plebiscite<\/a> that would have kept Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power for another eight years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the political left in retreat across the region, the banner of what Spain\u2019s socialist government calls \u201cdemocratic memory<\/a>\u201d has been taken up by writers, artists, and filmmakers, many of whom were children during periods of dictatorship.<\/p>\n Mendon\u00e7a Filho was born in Recife in 1968, four years into Brazil\u2019s dictatorship. A loyal son of the city, he has now set three features and a documentary in his hometown, whose sights and sounds seem to be an infinitely renewable resource of artistic inspiration; his breakout feature, Neighboring Sounds <\/em>(2012), was filmed in Set\u00fabal, the neighborhood he grew up in. (One character even lives in his mother\u2019s real-life apartment.) Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s films are marked by a warm sense of humor and a keen eye for dissecting Brazil\u2019s striated society. While his previous feature, the dystopian Bacurau <\/em>(2019), left Recife\u2014and realism\u2014behind, The Secret Agent <\/em>conjures up a charming, chaotic vision of the filmmaker\u2019s hometown, teeming with rich colors and delightfully specific details.<\/p>\n The stranger, it turns out, is a research scientist called Marcelo. He has come to Recife to pick up his 5-year-old son, Fernando, and flee the country, though for the first half of the movie it\u2019s not clear why. While Marcelo waits for a false passport, he\u2019s given shelter by an irrepressible elderly woman named Dona Sebastiana (played with winning aplomb by T\u00e2nia Maria).<\/p>\n Even amid the exuberance of Carnaval, unease looms over the city. The local police chief (Rob\u00e9rio Di\u00f3genes), who tries to befriend Marcelo, makes a joke about a newspaper headline that has the Carnaval death toll at 91: By the end of the holiday, he says, it\u2019ll be over 100. The police are responsible for at least one of those deaths; after a human leg turns up in the belly of a dead shark, they do what they can to make this evidence of extrajudicial murder disappear.<\/p>\n The suspense ratchets up with the arrival of a pair of killers\u2014baby-faced Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) and his stepfather, Borba (a terrifying Roney Villela). They\u2019ve been dispatched by S\u00e3o Paulo industrialist Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who orders them to \u201cleave a big hole\u201d in Marcelo\u2019s mouth. By the time we finally learn why Ghirotti is hounding Marcelo, the film shifts unexpectedly. Another plotline, set in the present day, introduces two young women, apparent researchers, listening to tapes recounting Marcelo\u2019s story. When we return to 1977, the strands between the storylines begin to twist and tighten, building toward the film\u2019s dramatic conclusion.<\/p>\n This daring narrative swerve interrupts Marcelo\u2019s story at its moment of maximum tension, leaving key questions unanswered. Among them: whether Ghirotti had a role in the death of Marcelo\u2019s wife, F\u00e1tima, played in a brief but scene-stealing flashback by Alice Carvalho. When I first saw the film, I was irked by this lack of resolution. But upon reflection, I began to appreciate Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s gesture. Though the Brazilian Truth Commission\u2019s report on state-sanctioned murder and torture runs to nearly 2,000 pages, no official document can ever provide a full account for the way authoritarianism worms its way into daily life. For that, we need art. Especially the kind of art that details how the powers that be can find a way to thrive in just about any political structure. (Ghirotti, who orders the hit on Marcelo, also serves on the board of Eletrobras, Brazil\u2019s state-owned electric utility; it\u2019s not hard to imagine his thuggish son as a fervent Bolsonaro supporter.)<\/p>\n Our questions about \u201cwhat really happened,\u201d Mendon\u00e7a Filho suggests, will stick around whether we ignore them or not. Like the hairy leg pulled from the shark\u2019s belly, they remain undigested.<\/p>\n Director Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho and Moura on the set of The Secret Agent<\/i>. IMDB<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n For too long, Hollywood has portrayed dictatorship as a totalitarian, all-encompassing affair\u2014whether in the grim, washed-out Soviet bread lines or the dark glamor and clinical efficiency of Nazi Germany. The Secret Agent <\/em>is a welcome corrective, particularly for those of us living through the steady erosion of democratic norms<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s been a banner year for Brazilian cinema. The Secret Agent<\/em>, already receiving significant international acclaim, follows on the heels of I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>(dir. Walter Salles) winning best foreign feature at the 2025 Oscars. The two films are interesting companion pieces, and not only because Brazil has nominated<\/a> The Secret Agent <\/em>for Oscars consideration. Together, they offer up a more nuanced portrait of authoritarianism than the typical Hollywood fare. Both juxtapose the menace and paranoia of the dictatorship with the sexual and psychedelic liberation of Brazil\u2019s revolutionary tropic\u00e1lia<\/em> cultural movement. Each film also features characters in the present who literally cannot remember the events that have unfolded onscreen, emphasizing the difficulty\u2014and vital importance\u2014of excavating the past.<\/p>\n Despite their thematic similarities, the films are tonal opposites. I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>is a stately, measured drama that depicts the dictatorship\u2019s devastating effect on a middle-class family. The film\u2019s real-life protagonist, Eunice Paiva (played by Fernanda Torres), is a model of courageous insistence. Her refusal to play along or accept half-truths and lies, even after the generals were no longer in power, should be celebrated. Would that we all\u2014let alone those in positions of political and corporate leadership\u2014had her fortitude.<\/p>\n A scene from The Secret Agent<\/i>.IMDB<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yet despite The Secret Agent<\/em>\u2019s over-the-top zaniness, I wonder whether it ultimately offers a more believable portrait of life under authoritarianism. Its vision is certainly more small-d democratic: Marcelo\u2014and by extension Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2014spends far more time among the office cleaners, movie projectionists, and low-level bureaucrats than he does with his fellow intellectuals. This is a world where the difference between a wealthy industrialist, a smooth-talking professional hitman, and a clownish cop comes down to a matter of a couple thousand cruzeiros<\/em>. Meanwhile, the rest do what they can to get by. This is neither a cynical nor scolding portrayal; Mendon\u00e7a Filho seems genuinely amused by our foibles, even as he clearly admires those who speak up (like F\u00e1tima and the spritely Dona Sebastiana) and those who work hard, against every obstacle, to stitch together the truth (like Fl\u00e1via, one of the present-day researchers, played by Laura Luf\u00e9si).<\/p>\n
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