Why Secret Agent Should Win the Academy Award for Best Picture | film

AIn all, this year’s Oscars feature about six favorites and headliners, and among them are some truly great films. But the film that sticks in my mind is Knight’s step away from consensus on the talking point: a sophisticated, wayward, and astonishingly talkative film from Brazil, a film about love and fatherhood, tyranny and resistance, and coming to terms with the past. It is digressive and humorous, and yet in its final act it escalates startlingly from lurid mystery to tension and cold violence.

When the Academy Award for Best Picture is announced, my heart sings to see producers Emilie Lesclau and Cléber Mendonça Filho walk up on stage to accept the award for their dramatic thriller The Secret Agent. Directed by Mendonça Filho, it is a film made in a minimalist style and influenced by pure cinematic inspiration. The opening scene alone, with its black comedic angst, is itself a kind of masterpiece. It’s like Antonioni’s “Passenger” mixed with Leone, Peckinpah, and Elmore Leonard’s pulp shock. However, it has a kind of narrative and episodic quality – a wonderful discursive self-awareness. You could call it a small miracle, although despite its near-epic length (2 hours and 40 minutes), it is actually a very big miracle.

The film takes place in the Brazilian city of Recife during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. Wagner Moura plays Armando, a widower and engineering professor who, although neither a dissident nor a leftist, is now an enemy of the state. He flees in his yellow VW Beetle — the director mischievously makes VW Beetles a recurring motif — from Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a businessman with government connections, racist attitudes, misogynistic tendencies, and Mafia revenge. Armando angrily confronts the senior over his plans to shut down his university department and appropriate its research for his own corrupt purposes — and over his drunken insults to his late wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho). Mendonça implies that his buried anger at the way Girotti humiliated her was also motivated by guilt over what may have been his infidelities.

So Girotti hires two hitmen, Bobby (Gabriel León) and Augusto (Ronny Vilela), to beat up Armando for 60,000 cruzeiros, a task they promptly contract out to local villain Vilmar (Cayone Venancio) for 4,000 cruzeiros. Meanwhile, Armando has to hide out under a fake name in a safe house owned by a resistance movement and run by a kindly ex-communist named Doña Sebastiana – a brilliant performance from the unprofessional director Tania María. And he longs for nothing more than to see his son, now cared for by his elderly parents – his father-in-law is an projectionist at the local cinema, which is showing a trailer for The Man from Acapulco, a film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo (better known as The Secret Agent).

And all this in a city in the middle of its annual carnival, whose Bacchanalian chaos is being used as cover by the grotesque local police chief Euclid Cavalcanti (Roberio Diogenes) – surely one of cinema’s greatest sweaty bad cops – resulting in the murder or “disappearance” of at least 100 people. Euclid likes to make unsolicited social calls to the expatriate German tailor Hans (a wonderful and final performance from Udo Kier) – the policeman is astonished because he thinks he is an escaped Nazi and cannot understand that Hans is a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

In addition to all this, the city is also in the grip of a “Jaws”-like fever: the classic Spielberg movie made everyone crazy about sharks, so everyone is hooked on the news that a shark has been found with a human leg in its stomach – much to Euclid’s annoyance. The leg clearly belonged to one of the bodies he threw into the sea. This shark is everyone’s dream, it brings fascist Brazil the return of the repressed: the truth of what is happening. As for Armando, while trying to obtain a passport for himself and his son to leave Brazil, he has a job at the government ID department and, with poignantly suppressed grief, tries to find documentary records of his late mother.

This is the opening scene! A spacious, sunny plain with a secluded gas station. Armando stopped by and was astonished to see a body lying on the dusty road outside, with a piece of cardboard laying on top of it. The station attendant explains that it is the three-day-old body of a thief killed by his employee that has now escaped. The police were called, but of course they never arrived. Nothing can be less than a priority. But then, at that moment, two policemen actually arrive: as venal and semi-competent as any other authority figure, they proceed to do nothing but harass Armando and demand bribes. The scene is funny but disturbing and returns in Armando’s dreams. (And mine.)

When the final, gritty action sequence begins, the climax is all the more shocking and sad because it occurs off-camera, from the perspective of present-day historical researchers trying to reconstruct these events through newspaper recordings and audio interviews recorded by the action at the time.

The secret agent is almost completely apolitical. In fact, the only character feisty enough to offer a socialist opinion is the formidable Doña Sebastiana. Otherwise, her dissidence expresses itself in mood, rhetoric, and attitude. Resistance leader Elsa (María Fernanda Cándido) is amused by Armando’s comment that his fake identity resembles the American Witness Protection Program. Elsa answers: “Over there, it’s done with a lot of money and by their government. Here, it’s all a bit improvised, Brazilian style – to protect you from Brazil!”

In a way, that describes the film’s action: a little improvised, on the surface anyway. The film meanders and soars. He brings in lively sub-characters for little more reason than to briefly introduce them. All human life is here, and Wagner Moura’s performance is both intelligent and powerful.