I suffered through several mild annoyances while watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, although there’s no disputing that it’s a respectably “good” film in its own curious, unhurried, dark-fantasy way…a meandering, almost lethargic dream trip about living through a climate of political terror in 1977 Brazil.
It’s a half-solemn, half-eccentric ensemble drama set in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco and a sizable beach town, during Brazil’s heinous military dictatorship (1964-1985).
Story-wise it’s about Wagner Moura‘s Marcelo, a university researcher looking to reunite with his son while gradually getting wind that he has reason to fear for his life.
Alas, he doesn’t learn that a pair of assassins are after his ass until just before the two-hour mark, and that, in my view, is not an especially good thing for the audience.
The last half-hour of The Secret Agent (bad guy assassins, dodging bullets, blam blam) certainly qualifies as a Hithcockian suspense thing as well as an action thriller, but for the first 120 minutes we’re basically stuck with Marcelo, whose actual name is eventually revealed to be Armando, as he sniffs and laments and roams around and recalls his past and discusses the general state of things with this and that friend or former colleague.
The first two hours, in short, are basically an absorption and a capturing of Brazil’s unsettled mood during that anxious era, but with an occasional focus on gay sex and blowjobs (including the straight-person kind!) in particular, not to mention sharks and Jaws and a hairy severed leg.
It must be said that David Rooney‘s 5.18 Hollywood Reporter review of The Secret Agent has overpraised the shit out of this film. Rooney got me so pumped last night, only to feel crestfallen as the actual film unspooled.
“Enlivened by a populous, almost Altman-esque gallery of characters — way too many to mention — played without a single false note, and by the strong sense of a community pulling together for safety from the oppressive forces outside, the movie luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho’s intense love for the setting. It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year“….calm down, bruh.
Oh, and I hated the color scheme…bleachy-looking in daytime scenes with heavily saturated yellows and oranges and paint splashings of fierce green and teal-blue…I was hating on this all through the 159-minute running time. Mendonça Filho’s mixture of oppressive yellows plus orange-teal splotchitude had me twitching with discomfort.
