Suscribe

Articles

Critic

Interview

Festivals

News

Traducciones

Agenda

About Caligari

Autores

Between Popular Festivity and the Shadows of the Dictatorship. On The Secret Agent, by Kleber Mendonça Filho

“The story moves freely between different points of view, allowing both persecutors and the persecuted to have their own depth. Each character seems to carry their own version of the story, and in that overlap emerges the sense of a violence that permeates social life.”

Por Valentina Soto

There is something paradoxical about the title The Secret Agent, because its protagonist is not really a spy in the classical sense, but someone forced to live as if he were. From the very first scene, it becomes clear that his clandestine life is born not from intrigue or glamour, but from fear. The gas station sequence immediately establishes a distorted logic: a corpse appears, yet the police ignore the body and focus on the traveler. That gesture sets the tone for the entire film. This is not about solving a crime, but about surviving within a system in which the very notion of crime has been warped. Late-1970s Brazil emerges as a territory where a careless word can trigger persecution, and where everyday normalcy coexists with constant threat. The film unfolds as a political thriller, yet avoids the genre’s typical linearity. Rather than relying on mechanical suspense, the director builds a network of characters and situations that reveal a society marked by control and paranoia. The story moves freely between different points of view, allowing both persecutors and the persecuted to have their own depth. Each character seems to carry their own version of the story, and in that overlap emerges the sense that the regime’s violence does not exist in isolated acts, but permeates the entire fabric of social life.

The protagonist’s return to Recife during Carnival heightens the contrast between festivity and danger. The city is saturated with color, music, and movement, yet beneath that surface lies a persistent unease. Carnival functions as an ambiguous mirror: it celebrates popular vitality while concealing what cannot be spoken aloud. Mendonça Filho uses this tension to construct a space where joy does not cancel fear, but makes it more unsettling. The protagonist’s arrival at the building where he takes refuge introduces him to a clandestine community sustained by solidarity and silence. There we encounter the maternal figure of Sebastiana, a woman who embodies the ethics of everyday resistance. She is not a grandiose heroine, but someone who supports others through simple gestures, money passed discreetly, and shared codes.

One of the film’s most suggestive aspects is its relationship with memory. The narrative does not unfold like an orderly chronicle, but like a constellation of recollections, echoes, and documents. The past does not appear as something closed, but as unstable matter that breaks into the present. Contemporary scenes in which a young woman listens to recordings or reconstructs fragments of the story introduce an almost archaeological dimension. Cinema thus becomes a device of recovery, a way of making audible what was silenced. This operation extends beyond the plot and into the film’s staging. The visual textures, sounds, and objects all seem charged with history, as if each frame were trying to preserve something before it disappears.

The context of the military dictatorship runs through the entire film without the need for explicit speeches. State violence is suggested through absences, suspicions, and small fractures in everyday life. We know there were kidnappings, torture, and censorship, but Kleber prefers to show the traces those events left on ordinary people. The protagonist’s persecution is not explained immediately, and that delay is crucial. The uncertainty recreates the experience of those who lived under the regime, forced to navigate a world where information circulated in fragments and danger could appear without warning. When the reasons for his flight are finally revealed, the tragedy takes on a more intimate than epic dimension. Cinema within cinema occupies a central place in this construction. The decisive encounter in a movie theater is not just a narrative device, but a statement of principles. The cinematic space appears both as refuge and emotional archive. Mendonça Filho, a critic before becoming a director, turns the cinematic experience into an act of symbolic resistance. The darkened theater not only physically protects the characters, but preserves stories that power tried to erase. In that sense, The Secret Agent dialogues with other works by the director in which movie theaters function as repositories of collective memory, places where the past continues to breathe even as the city changes around them.

The relationship between the protagonist and his son introduces another layer of meaning. The desire to escape the country is not framed as an adventure, but as a desperate attempt to break a chain of losses. The child, who perceives the persecution only vaguely, becomes obsessed with images he does not fully understand, such as the shark that appears in his dreams and drawings. This motif works as a metaphor for inherited fear, a threat that floats in the child’s imagination without a clear face. The film suggests that political violence does not end with events themselves, but extends into later generations, transformed into ghosts and silences. The staging privileges duration and atmosphere. Scenes unfold patiently, allowing gestures and spaces to breathe. Tension arises not from the accumulation of spectacular events, but from the feeling of always being under surveillance. The camera moves with curiosity, as if trying to grasp something elusive. Even in moments of greater violence, the film maintains a contemplative quality that distances it from the conventional thriller. This choice reinforces the idea that the true conflict is not a single pursuit, but a historical climate.

It is also striking how humor and tenderness are woven into the narrative. Secondary characters bring moments of lightness that do not break the tone, but complicate it. Solidarity among neighbors, shared rituals, and scenes of everyday coexistence create a human counterpoint to oppression. Life continues to flow even in adverse contexts, and that persistence of the ordinary becomes a form of quiet resistance. The ending embraces ellipsis and ambiguity. The revelation of the protagonist’s fate through a still image is devastating precisely because of its restraint. The character, so alive throughout the film, is reduced to a remnant, a document barely sufficient to prove he existed. This transformation underscores one of the film’s central ideas: the fragility of memory in the face of time and institutional violence. What remains is not a closed conclusion, but a sense of loss and historical debt, functioning as an exercise in cinematic memory that questions how the past continues to resonate in the present. The city of Recife appears as an organism traversed by layers of time, where every street seems to contain overlapping histories. Mendonça Filho films with the conviction that cinema can preserve those layers, even imperfectly. The result is a work that combines political urgency with deeply personal sensitivity. More than a thriller in the strict sense, the film feels like a meditation on memory, fear, and the persistence of images.

¡Los suscriptores de Caligari ya pueden reservar sus entradas para el mes de marzo! 🎬✨

CARTELERA MARZO:

Fuck The Polis, de Rita Azevedo Gomes

Sound Of Falling, de Mascha Schilinski

Olivia, de Sofía Petersen

UN POETA, de Simón Mesa Soto

Entradas