Carnival provides a history of practical coverage for nearly 100 deaths and disappearances in “The Secret Agent”, the robust immersion of the sensory memory of Kleber Mendonca Filho in the sites, sounds and suffocating climate – both political and meteorological – the Brazilian director associated with the recurrence of 1977. It was a period of great “misdeeds”, according to the opening titles, although it was A word too light to describe daily corruption which permeates almost all aspects of this fleshy 160 -minute room. Mendonça remembers well, demonstrating how even the worst times can inspire a kind of perverse nostalgia.
The 56 -year -old director was only 8 years old when the film takes place – about the same age as Fernando, the son of his main character, a man of multiple identity played by the star of “Narcos” Wagner Moura – and he seems sure to assume that the title of “Jaws” of the boy) was inspired by the filmmaker of the film. Mendonça shows a remarkable capacity not only to recreate, but to bring us back to that time, with its oppressive heat and its paranoia.
Throughout the film, men will work without shirts – their only way to face the temperature – but it is nothing compared to the daily pressure exerted on normal citizens under the military dictatorship, whose grip has endured for eight years. Unlike the recent “I am Still Here” by Walter Salles, this project of more gender does not concern political kidnappings – at least, not directly – because the “Marcelo” of Moura (not his real name) flees northern Brazil to find his son.
On the way to Recife, he arrives in a service station, where a corpse is covered with cardboard, a few meters from the fuel pumps – an image that could have been raised from a film by Mario Bava from the same period. Life seems almost worthless in this world, as shown by the lack of interest that the two federal police officers show in the dead body establishes why Marcelo cannot go to the authorities to obtain aid.
If it was not for the title, we may not realize that we are watching a suspense film, and even then, it is not really the atmosphere that Mendonça opts-despite the stylistic choices that echo John Carpenter (Panavision lentils), Brian de Palma (divided screen) and Martin Scorsese (pop-music to make falls). Like the filmmakers of the new wave of France, Mendonça began her career as a journalist and critic, and this sensitivity permeates each framework, finding an attractive balance between originality and homage.
Here, we find it in Hitchcock mode, because a well-connected government official has put a contract on Marcelo, forcing him to take refuge with an old woman in Recife, who houses half a dozen others like him. Together, they represent a movement of fortune resistance, mainly composed of “long points”, gays and frank women.
The “secret agent”, if we even exist here, is not Marcel (a university researcher) but a woman named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who organized his alias, as well as a work for him in the identification office. There, he is free to browse the files of any document which could be linked to his deceased mother – whose meaning becomes clear in the current Coda of the film (where the clean moura appears in a second role).
During his first day of work, Marcelo observes the double standard in play in a system that protects the rich, while keeping the working class in its place – the same dynamic by which someone as himself could be muffled without recrimination. It is only many tangential criticisms that the Lobs director of Brazilian society in a film that could have been much less than two hours without such digressions.
Take an expressly written scene for Udo Kier, in which the cult star of “Bacurau” plays a German tailor, who raises his shirt to reveal the scars inflicted on him during the Second World War. This Jewish immigrant is a source of fun to the shaded local police, but also a reminder of the way the survivors carry a witness. Unless they are eaten by sharks which are then captured and studied by marine scientists. It is one of the foreign things that happen in the sliding and constantly surprising story of Mendonça.
When the tabloids have windy a human leg was found in the stomach of a shark, the audience is unleashed. From decades before social media, history becomes a viral sensation, motivating local theater owners to bring back the “jaws” in theaters, while inspiring scandalous “hairy leg” relationships in the media. In a delicious, absolutely Gonzo aside, Mendonça imagines these stories in the form of an operating film Chlocky, in which a disembodied member hides in the bushes of a local park, jumping and attacking the gay men who meet there – suggesting how such stories were planted by the regime to discourage unknown behavior.
In this case, the stepfather of Marcelo (Carlos Francisco) directs the Boa Vista cinema of the city, where “The Omen” leads the public to Madness. Mendonça’s feature film, the test film “Pictures of Ghosts”, cried the loss of Recife’s film palates, and this praise extends to “the secret agent”. Mendonça cracks the film with lively details of temporal capsule: vintage American cars and vinyl discs, eagerly chips and old -fashioned printing sets, obscene shorts and stifling heat.
These elements all contribute to a powerful sense of the place, which has literally been filtered through the objective of a film buff. Mendonça shot the film digitally, using vintage camera equipment to obtain a large anamorphic screen with high contrast and anamorphic consistent with this era. But one cannot be mistaken more modern, while the director pays the attention of political dissidents to a different set of heroes: queer fugues and women of color, who sit with Marcelo in the best scene in the film, sharing stories that have probably never been recorded, honored here for the first time.
