Kleber Mendonça Filho’s thriller about a hunted man in Recife in 1977 is funny, frightening and made with great care, and Wagner Moura holds it together by hardly moving. It is also long, and the present-day scenes are where you feel it.
Kleber Mendonça Filho has made a film about a woman who will not leave her flat (Aquarius) and one about a village that will not be wiped off the map (Bacurau). The Secret Agent is about a man who cannot stay anywhere. Wagner Moura plays him, and the credits give him three names, which tells you something. He arrives in Recife in the Carnival week of 1977, in the middle of the military dictatorship, takes a room in a house full of people who would rather not say why they are there, and tries to see his young son and get the papers that will let him leave the country. Someone with money would prefer he did neither. It is one of the better thrillers we have seen in some time, funny and frightening by turns, and it takes 161 minutes over a story that might have been told in 140.
Moura’s job is to look ordinary, and he does it by doing almost nothing. Marcelo keeps his shoulders down and his voice level, and the film’s best scenes are the ones where he sits across a desk from someone who is deciding whether he lives, and we watch him work out how much to smile. He is a man used to being clever who has learned that cleverness is now dangerous. When he is allowed to relax, with his boy or in the dark of a cinema, the change in his face is small, and it is the whole point.
Evgenia Alexandrova shoots Recife as a city where nobody is ever dry. Shirts stick to backs, the light is yellow by mid-morning, and she likes a long lens across a crowded street so that the man we are following is one figure among hundreds who could be anyone. Thales Junqueira’s production design puts 1977 in every corner: the boarding house of mismatched chairs and a shared telephone, the police offices with their desk fans and typewriters, a cinema with a painted front the size of a house, and cars in colours nobody has ordered since. None of it is shown off.
The film runs a newspaper story about a human leg found inside a shark through its first hour, and the whole city treats it as light entertainment. We laughed. Then Mendonça Filho shows us, plainly and in daylight, how ordinary the people doing the dictatorship’s dirty work are, as bored as plumbers, and we stopped laughing and felt slightly foolish for having started. The absurd and the murderous sit at the same table here, and nobody at the table thinks that is odd.
The supporting cast is full of people you want to follow home. Udo Kier’s Hans is an old German who has been in Brazil long enough to have his own way of not answering questions, and Kier gives him a courtesy that is more unsettling than rudeness would be. Gabriel Leone plays Bobbi, one of the men sent after Marcelo, as handsome, tired and not much interested in why. Maria Fernanda Cândido’s Elza keeps the network of hiding places running with the manner of a woman organising a church fete. Alice Carvalho, as Fátima, shares the house and gets one of the film’s few scenes of plain kindness.
Matheus Farias and Eduardo Serrano cut between 1977 and a present-day thread in which people go through archives and listen to old recordings. The cuts are clean and the idea is sound: this is a country going back through its own paperwork. But every return to the present stops the Recife story dead, and it was in those rooms, not in the heat, that we felt the running time. The score by Mateus Alves and Tomaz Alves de Souza mostly keeps its head down and lets the radio and the street carry the noise, which is the right decision.
Most critics have reached for Hitchcock, and there is something in it: an ordinary man, a false name, people who know more about him than he does. But Hitchcock would have cut half of this and been ashamed of the shark. Set against Mendonça Filho’s own work, it is warmer than Bacurau and less angry than Aquarius, and it shares with Pictures of Ghosts a fondness for old cinemas and the paper trails people leave behind.
See it in a cinema if you can, where the heat comes off the screen and into your seat. Take water, and do not plan anything afterwards.
