A man tries to take his son and escape the tyranny of Brazil’s corrupt government in 1977. The film conveys the deadly (and bloody) corruption of the time. And as a whole, this is an excruciatingly slow and jumbled film that’s rife with peculiar moments, foul language and surprising sexuality.
As Marcelo pulls into a dust-blown little gas station in the middle of nowhere, he has only one concern: getting back on the road. He has but a few Brazilian reais in his pocket, but hopefully it will be enough to get his little yellow VW to the destination on the map.
Marcelo—who isn’t really Marcelo—has to get to the coastal city of Recife, a place he used to call home, where he was called Armando. But none of that matters now. There’s just the road ahead.
As Marcelo stands beside his car, puffing on a cigarette and waiting for the attendant to saunter out and fill his tank, he’s startled to notice a dead body lying nearby in the gas station’s sunbaked dirt lot. The corpse is only partly covered by a sheet of cardboard as it rots and wafts a stench of decay.
The attendant finally makes his way out and tells Marcelo not to worry about the body. It was just some thief that the station’s night-shift attendant shot in the chest and face. The police were notified, but, well, it is Carnival time, so who knows when or if they might show up. If they wait long enough, the dogs will likely drag the mess away.
That’s exactly when the police drive up. But they show no interest in the dead man just fifteen feet away. They’re more interested in checking Marcelo’s documents, examining his car, exploring for anything that might be an infraction of the law. Finding nothing, the cop holds out a hand for a local police fund donation. But since Marcelo just gave his money to the gas attendant, all he can hand over are a few cigarettes in his last, nearly empty package.
The police leave. And so does the man in the yellow VW.
What does this incident have to do with Marcelo/Armando’s story? Absolutely nothing. But it does hint at the fact that Brazil in 1977 is a place of corruption. It’s a land under the pall of a deadly dictatorship.
At some point we’ll find out that Marcelo—or Armando, or whatever you want to call him—is a man who used to be a professor; he used to be a researcher, a husband, a father. He’s a man who has a government looking for him and a pair of assassins on his heels. Marcelo is an unfortunate, weary soul who wants to find one small hole through which he can escape.
However, all that matters now … is now. And the road.
We find out that Marcelo was married, but his wife is now deceased. And her parents have been taking care of the couple’s son, Fernando. Alexandre, Marcelo’s father-in-law is a down-to-earth guy—a good man who doesn’t completely trust Marcelo. Alexandre and his wife try to provide a different upbringing for Fernando. (We meet an older Fernando in the future who has benefited from his grandparents’ care.)
Marcelo tells Alexandre that his daughter once said Alexandre was a good man and father. These words bring the older man to tears.
A woman endangers herself to house and care for a group of people in need. She helps people get new IDs and so they can escape Brazil’s dangerous dictatorship.
We meet a former prisoner of war who is Jewish. Someone has a portrait of Jesus hanging on her wall.
A lengthy scene takes place in a local park that is populated by a scattered group of clothed and naked people involved in various carnal activities. There are one or two women in the mix, but most are men in pairs and in groups of three. We see one man’s hanging genitals. We’re shown a full-frontal view of a naked male corpse lying exposed in a morgue.
A group of women in bikinis dance and drink. Marcelo meets a refugee named Claudia, who tends to promote her curves with form-fitting clothing. The two begin a sexual relationship and we see them in and out of bed while partially clothed. We see Claudia’s bared breasts on two occasions. They embrace and kiss.
While working in an information archive, Marcelo stumbles upon a clothed couple having sex behind some filing cabinets. Marcelo also leans out of a movie theater’s projection booth and watches a woman sexually pleasuring a man during a movie.
We’re told of how a thief attacked a man with a knife and got shot in the face with a shotgun. A pack of hungry dogs surround the man’s corpse and attempt to drag it away. A dead shark gets hoisted onto a university lab table where a professor cuts it open and removes a bitten-off human leg from its stomach. The slicing procedure is followed by a huge gush of bloody fluid.
Two hitmen open the trunk of their car and shoot a bound and wrapped victim in the head twice. Then they weight the body and throw it off a bridge. This pair repeats that means of disposal with a severed leg. (It’s implied that the leg was evidence in another crime that they may have been a part of.) We see the bloody and disembodied leg again, moving on its own after washing ashore. It seemingly attacks people in a park, bloodying a few and kicking a man in his unclothed groin. One of the hitmen washes a great deal of blood out of his car.
The hitmen get hired by a corrupt official to kill Marcelo—specifically to create a large hole in his face. We see them tracking Marcelo and hiring a local thug in Recife to aid in the murder. In a confluence of action we see one man get cornered and badly wounded. His attackers get brutally killed—one shot in the eye and another shot in the neck and cheek. (The camera captures the intense gore and writhing agony of that attack.) Another man gets shot in the back of the head, blowing blood and brain matter around a small room.
In a flashback scene, a pair of inebriated individuals attempt to manhandle Marcelo’s wife. Marcelo punches one of them to the ground. When asked about the conflict later, Marcelo claims that he is not an inherently violent man, but he would bash in the attackers’ heads with a hammer. It’s implied that Marcelo’s wife, who was thought to have died of pneumonia, may have actually been killed by one of those men Marcelo struggled with.
A group of people discuss their worries over Brazil’s controlling regime and its deadliness. A woman cries and screams when she learns her young daughter has died. A man shows people the savage scars he received as a prisoner of war during World War II.
There are 15 f-words and 8 s-words scattered through the movie’s dialogue along with multiple uses of the crudities “b–tard,” “h—,” “d–k,” “pr–k” and “p—y.” There are a total of five misuses of Jesus’ and God’s names (two of which blend God with “d–n”).
A man angrily calls someone else a “f-gg-t.”
Marcelo smokes throughout the movie, as do several other characters. We see people drinking beer and alcohol at two different gatherings. Carnival partiers drink as they dance in the streets. A small group of people drink glasses of alcohol during a dinner together, and one man gets quite inebriated.
Someone comments crudely that a man soiled himself while watching a scary movie. In that same film, a woman cries out and flails around; she has to get carried out of the theater. A crooked federal official steals money from a university research department. Local police are friends with the hitmen that roll into Recife.
Just in case you were wondering, The Secret Agent isn’t really about government spy work. It actually tells the story of Marcelo, a former professor on the run. He goes back to his hometown of Recife with the hope of grabbing his son and escaping the brutal military dictatorship that controlled Brazil in 1977.
We, the viewing audience, are supposed to watch his efforts and get a sense of the paranoia and violence of that time.
I tell you all that because, frankly, you’ll sit through 80 to 90 minutes of this film before getting even the slightest sense of what’s going on. And it’s not because of a language barrier (the film is in Portuguese with English subtitles) but rather the slow and disjointed ambling that’s happening on screen.
This Academy Award-nominated pic has been praised by critics as a masterpiece of political cinema that mixes up its genres and presents its tale with a “daringly languid pace.” Personally, I just found it to be odd, hard to follow and painfully slow.
I’m not saying that there aren’t some well-crafted scenes or interesting moments in this movie’s mix. But it feels like director Kleber Mendonça Filho is often tossing things up against the cinematic wall—sometimes absolute nonsense that doesn’t move the plot forward in the slightest—just to see if anything will stick in some idiosyncratic way. One bizarro sequence, for instance, focuses on a disembodied, bloody leg hopping through a park and attacking naked men who are having carnal relations.
Of course, while the director is jumping back and forth in time—introducing scores of incidental, meaningless characters and tossing out this and that—he’s also flinging buckets of foul language, disquieting sexuality and intensely bloody violence at the screen. And trust me, when a film is clocking in at an excruciatingly slow two hours and 41 minutes, that’s a lot of flinging. A lot of flinging.
Oh, and there’s a cat with two faces that slinks around from time to time, too. You know, just ‘cause.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
