- IMDB link: The Secret Agent
- Tagline: "In 1977, a technology expert flees from a mysterious past and returns to his hometown of Recife in search of peace. He soon realizes that the city is far from being the refuge he seeks."
- My Best Picture Project
What a weird and wonderful movie that is just full of sweaty hairy-chested Brazilian men, and if they button their shirts at all, they never do so past their sternums. It was a lot of work to watch, though (as all foreign-language films are for me these days) since they require subtitles. It's my first Portuguese-language movie, and it was like watching a Spanish-language movie (lots of shared vocabulary), but ... not.
It opens with a wonderfully absurd scene of a man in a yellow VW bug stopping for gasoline at a gas station with a corpse lying in the parking lot. The cops show up, but they are more interested in the man in the Volkswagen than in the corpse. The movie is mostly a drama, but with some darkly funny moments.
It's visually beautiful and well-acted, but there are also lots of oddball themes, like Jaws, severed legs recovered from shark bellies, and just incredibly corrupt cops, businessmen, and assassins.
I was very confused, though, when a newspaper reported on a story about "the hairy leg", and then we see the severed leg from the shark hopping around, kicking people, mostly individuals engaging in public sex in a park. Was it South American magical realism? Was it just an oddball, surreal moment? Was it folklore? Turns out it was a literal (though surreal) embodiment of 1970s-era newspaper codespeak referring to police brutality, particularly against the gay community.
Another odd moment was when the local police chief took Marcelo (the main character) to meet an elderly German man, to show off the man's scars. The policeman assumes the old man was a Wehrmacht soldier in WW2, and I, too, assumed he was a Nazi hiding out in Brazil, but it turns out the opposite is true. He was a Holocaust survivor, and the scars came not from being a soldier but from being the victim of those soldiers. A cautionary moment warning us not to assume we know someone's past?
The movie leaves many questions unanswered. What happened to Marcelo's mother? What happened to the villain who destroyed Marcelo's life? Why are the people in modern-day Brazil researching him? (That may be obvious to someone who knows the culture better than I do, though.)
The pacing is good, and it's a slow build from oddly normalized weirdness to a crescendo of satisfying violence that is worthy of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):
- Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
- Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
- Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
- One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
- F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris: 5)
- The Secret Agent (Strange, sweaty movie about life in fascist Brazil; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)
- Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 8, Chris: 7)
- Sentimental Value (Slow-paced movie about a family of actors; Cathy: 7, Chris: 8)
- Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
- Marty Supreme (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
* Rankings can change.
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