It’s 1977, a “time of great mischief” in Brazil, and in the opening minutes of Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s “The Secret Agent,” Marcelo (Wagner Moura) appears to be on the run. He drives in the blazing heat, a raucous hint of Carnaval at the fringes—and the imminent threat of violence. A dead body outside of a gas station has been cooking in the sun for days, anonymized by a shot to the face, a sheet of cardboard covering it, and the police’s total disinterest in its existence. Marcelo, on the other hand, draws their interest almost immediately, and we can sense that he isn’t keen on the attention. Is he a dissident? A criminal? A spy? A communist? Truthfully, the federal police don’t really care, as long as he submits a donation to the “police Carnival fund.” He’s just another person to intimidate.
Our protagonist’s interest never abandons the gas station corpse, though. Even as the station attendant assures it has nothing to do with him, something about Marcelo’s gaze tells us it does. The corrupt cops are one thing, but this blatant, cruel disposability of life is a signal that in this moment in Brazil’s history, the ultimate punishment isn’t just your death, but the eradication of your existence.
Subsequent events in “The Secret Agent” throttle us into the throwback paranoid political thriller its title suggests. The familiar but colorful genre conventions are abundant: A corrupt civil police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his skull-cracking sons; bodies disposed of in the river under the cover of night; payphones and bugged telephone lines; forged passports; hitmen; sensational newspaper headlines; and split diopter shots as characters anxiously look over their shoulder.
And then, around the halfway point, something shifts, because these trademarks of intrigue are not the story of “The Secret Agent.” Marcelo—whose real name is Armando—is not the story, either. Not exactly. Midway through, we are abruptly introduced to a present-day university archivist, Flavia (Laura Lufési), who is trying to understand the past from what little memory remains. Slowly, “The Secret Agent” becomes Flavia’s story.
Filho’s filmmaking career is a lifelong interrogation of memory, an interest that is most explicit in “The Secret Agent’s” dramaturgical predecessor, “Pictures of Ghosts.” The essay film documents the history of Recife (the capital of Pernambuco, Brazil) and its movie palaces as an elegy to the infrastructure of memory. For Mendonça Filho, this is personal; the home featured in so many of his films is a document of his mother, an abolitionist historian who literally altered the apartment’s shape over decades. Mendonça Filho’s neighbors appear as extras in his films, and the streets of Recife often make up his settings. Recife is where “The Secret Agent” takes place, and the movie is rife with the city’s history and culture (the soundtrack, for example, includes several tracks from Recife musician Lula Côrtes’ 1975 album “Paêbirú”).
“The Secret Agent” is also mired in the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, seldom directly acknowledged, but constant in the depiction of the era’s emboldened state-sanctioned violence. This movie is Mendonça Filho’s attempt to prevent his country—and the world—from forgetting this period of history. But the movie is much more than an exercise in recall. “The Secret Agent,” more pointedly, is a movie about authoritarianism’s methodic persecution of the humanities as a field that documents, preserves, and deciphers collective memory.
Holding Objects of Memory
Nearly every facet of the humanities touches Armando: He is a researcher at a public university, the widower of a teacher, the son-in-law of a projectionist, a recipient of public funds, a subject of yellow (practically bile-colored) journalism, and briefly, a municipal record room employee. History won’t remember him as a freedom fighter against the Brazilian military dictatorship—so why is he being hunted like one?
The incident that leads to Armando’s persecution is an altercation years prior with Henrique Ghirotti, an energy executive who stands to benefit from the regime as the state pursues its business and development agendas. Ghirotti’s violence starts as bureaucratic. He drains university funding and lures researchers to private corporations until there are no remnants of Armando and his colleagues’ work. But what is implied to cost Armando’s wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), her life (and will eventually cost Armando his) is that they are witnesses to this abuse of power, and they will not submit to Ghirotti’s narrative. If it weren’t for the archived recordings of one wealthy resister (Elza, portrayed by Maria Fernanda Cândido), Armando’s honest memory wouldn’t exist at all.
Those tapes are just an example of the tangible objects of memory that texture the movie. At every turn, characters are interacting with photographs, records, newspapers, and written notes. Memory exists in the DNA of these objects. A photo is imprinted with the light that reflected from Fatima while she was alive. A vinyl record possesses within its grooves every little sound that makes up the rich melancholy of “Retiro: Tema de Amor Número 3” (something you can hold onto, unlike the crackling radio waves projecting Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now”). The films projected by Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) at the Cinema São Luiz possess a millisecond of life in a single frame (and, if you’re one of the hysterical audience members watching “The Omen,” you may even think they possess the Devil).
These are also the objects that can be manipulated and destroyed, an erasure as tangible as the item that held the memory. One of the most sensational sequences in “The Secret Agent” is based on a real-life Recife urban legend—”the Hairy Leg.” But while “the Hairy Leg” may have been obvious code for police misconduct, in the film, the sensationalism is all that is needed to turn violence against queer communities into an entertaining vision of a phantom leg terrorizing cruisers. “The Hairy Leg” becomes the story that lives on, whether true or not.
As we jump ahead in time, we come to understand that Flavia and her peer, Daniela, are the generation left to reckon with the implications of the dictatorship’s attacks on the humanities. The powers that be took control of Armando’s narrative. Prior to the recovery of Elza’s tapes, the sole remnant of Armando’s preserved existence was a newspaper clipping painting him as a corrupt researcher who hemorrhaged public funds. Beside the story is a graphic photo of his slain body. The memory of Armando the state preserved was a false one.
It is only through the processes of archiving and preservation—possible in this case through wealth—that allows a sliver of Armando’s honest existence to end up in Flavia’s possession. Elza’s donated archive of tapes documents the violent mischief of those days in Recife. Flavia and Daniela may have the thankless job of transcribing these tapes, but they also become the carriers of history. Naturally, then, Brazil’s politics of memory must intervene. The tapes are deemed “too sensitive,” abruptly withdrawn, and the transcription project is shut down. Decades later, the humanities remain a threat to power.
History Can’t Die With Us
Memory will always survive in some capacity through oral tradition. Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) may as well be a lockbox full of undocumented memory. Her tenants are all under persecution in one way or another and thus anonymized for protection. Their names cannot live on safely. Though the situations of some characters are evident—Thereza Vitória and Antonio (Isabél Zuaa and Licínio Januário) are Angolan Civil War refugees, for example—it is mostly unclear what brought these characters to the same place at the same point in time. The sole torchbearer of their existence is Sebastiana, just as she carries silent testimony from witnessing the war in Italy. But without some kind of preservation, these memories will eventually become warped, fuzzy, and faded.
Very early in “The Secret Agent,” Armando has a chance to spend time alone with his young Fernando. They talk about Fatima and what it means for someone to die. Though it is just the two of them in the car, Armando reminds his child that she is there with them because they carry her memory. Heartbreakingly, this does not stop his son from admitting days later that he is beginning to forget her.
As Flavia learns, the adult Fernando (Moura) has forgotten his father, too. Whatever tools Ghirotti and his conspirators used to erase Armando’s existence were successful as far as his son is concerned. He can’t fill in the gaps between the tapes and the papers. He shares with Flavia the closest thing he has to a memory of his father: Alexandre had once described how Fernando waited for his Armando to return the day he was killed. This isn’t really a part of Fernando’s recollection, but he says that by having someone else describe what happened, “you create a memory.”
Armando’s search for a record of his mother, who was physically and financially exploited by his father and grandparents, is an attempt to forge a memory of her that was withheld from him. Whether it is because of her implied indigeneity or a general attitude toward women as disposable, a record is unlikely to exist, yet Armando still searches for a single object bearing her name.
Perhaps Flavia’s attachment to Armando is through the memories she created from the few archives of his life—memories that had been withheld from Fernando until Flavia hands over a USB of the pirated archived recordings. These memories, like these, are incomplete, shaded by the perspective of whoever recounts them. Regardless, Flavia is defying the story Brazil would wish to tell about Armando. It is a small gesture that ensures Armando’s memory survives.
Preservation Pre- and Post-Google
“The Secret Agent’s” infrequent (but critical) jumps to the present day might feel alienating against its pulpy beats, but those genre-inflected scenes are representative of how one might try to make sense of an incomplete understanding of history with the limited artifacts that remain—cinematic flourishes by way of 1970s neo-noirs and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Armando and Flavia’s arcs are ultimately one and the same. Even if the threats they face feel considerably different in scale, these threats are outgrowths of the same authoritarian core.
In times of social and political strife, we often proclaim, “History will not look upon this moment kindly.” But how will history remember us if the historians are executed? Will Google remember you and me? (Daniela admits that she eventually stopped looking into Armando’s story because it is “pre-Google.”) Who will control our memories? Will we control them ourselves, or will they be in the hands of whoever has the privilege of rewriting them?
“The Secret Agent” is Mendonça Filho’s effort to prevent Brazil and the world from erasing people like Armando, who were tortured and killed for any perceived opposition to the dictatorship. But the movie is also a metatextual exploration of the relationship to memory that is central to his career. Cinema, as a narrative and visual art form, is inevitably a factor in memory. Even (and perhaps especially) when it is dishonest, incomplete, or speculative, it shapes the truth.
The arts and humanities are an essential vanguard of resistance because they threaten the total and complete control authoritarianism demands, and that is why they become targets of attack through funding, censorship, and eradication. As the question of art’s involvement in politics (and vice versa) continues to plague filmmakers, Mendonça Filho is unflinching in his belief that the two can’t be separated.
In the world of the movie and throughout all of Mendonça Filho’s filmography, remembrance is an act of resistance as much as it is an act of love. To remember the lives lost to your home’s dark history is to love your home enough to want better for the future—to ensure that those who were lost are part of the prevailing collective memory of what makes up your home’s identity. Preservation differs from nostalgia. To remember is not to yearn for an idealism of the past. It is to walk with reverence amongst the ghosts that inhabit the present.
