Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
Armando Solimoes, the sad-eyed central character played by Wagner Moura in Secret agentis not a government operative, despite the film's title. He's also not working undercover, although for much of the first half of the film, Kleber Mendonça Filho's stunning latest, he goes by the alias Marcelo Alves. When Armando first pulls up to a gas station on the outskirts of his hometown of Recife in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle, scuffed from days on the road, he has an air of wariness that suggests there's more to him than meets the eye. Then again, it's 1977 in Brazil, and a certain amount of caution is required on everyone, given that the country has been under a military dictatorship for over a decade, the effects of which have seeped into many aspects of daily life. We get a sense of this destabilization in the first scene, when Armando spots a corpse decomposing about a dozen yards from a gas station—a would-be thief, the attendant tells him, of whose death the police were notified days earlier. But when a couple of cops finally pull up while the men are talking, it's not to take care of the body, but to shake up this passerby by taking the remains of his pack of cigarettes when he runs out of money.
Secret agent This is Moura's first Portuguese-language role in years, and he imbues Armando with the gritty gravitas of a New Hollywood star while embodying the idiosyncrasies of his time and place so vividly that he could be an old Polaroid come to life. The entire film is shot in the rich tones of an exhumed photo album, for reasons that only begin to become clear halfway through the film, when it abruptly shifts to the present day, with researchers at a university working with archival material. Armando is not just a man who clashed with an oligarch linked to the regime—he is himself a half-forgotten memory, a man we begin to realize we gain a deeper understanding of than the people he left behind. Although the timing is unintentional, Armando appears as Leonardo DiCaprio's melancholic South American counterpart to Bob Ferguson. One battle after another – another single father who was forced into hiding after taking a stand, who finds refuge in a community of outsiders and rebels and who only wants to communicate with his child, a mischievous boy named Fernando who has become obsessed with sharks thanks to marketing Jaws.
The key differences between Bob and Armando, other than Armando being much less of a clown, are the perspective from which they are viewed and the extent to which they chose to fight in which they find themselves. If Paul Thomas Anderson's film is filmed from the point of view of a regretful Gen Xer looking forward to the world and the struggles his teenage daughter has inherited, Secret agent looks back a lot, as if seeking to use cinema to open a portal to a past that has been hidden beneath scars or paved over and rebuilt. (The film contains all sorts of references to Filho's latest film, a personal document Ghost Photosincluding a reference to a movie theater that has been converted into a blood bank.) Time has a way of making trauma survivors reluctant to unearth the past and afraid to speak out about injustices that have gone unaddressed. Secret agent is an act of double defiance of this erasure. The film itself is presented as a kind of séance for Armando, whose fate is long unknown, but traces of which remain on old audiotapes recorded by a member of an activist group who tried to help him flee the country. But Armando himself doesn't want to leave without getting his own artifact from the past – the ID file his own teenage mother filed years ago, quite possibly the only trace he'll find that she ever existed.
The one who writes history must define it, while everyone else disappears along with living memory. But if Secret agent as complex and rewarding as the taste of a dusty bottle of wine, it's also part of an ongoing conversation in this year's releases about what it means to be part of the resistance, which includes not only Anderson's action but Jafar Panahi's as well. It was just an accident and a documentary film by Russian journalist Yulia Lokteva My unwanted friends. Some of the characters in the Recife apartment complex where Armando is hiding out, such as the deliciously salty matriarch Doña Sebastiana (Tania Maria, one of several actors who also appeared in Bacurau), former revolutionaries. But what others have in common is that they are simply fleeing, escaping bad situations at home or, in the case of the Angolan couple, danger at home. Armando himself is an unintentional rebel, still furious that his life is in danger because he had the nerve to stand up to the smug businessman who shut down his university departments. But you don't have to be an active protester to find yourself on the wrong side of authoritarianism; you only need to cross someone who likes the powers that be. IN Secret agentthere is no boundary between a refugee and a participant in the resistance movement – there is only the state and people called its enemies.
