Brazil could strike Oscar gold two years in a row!
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last narrative feature to screen at the New York Film Festival was Bacurau, which was a strange, wacky western of sorts. He’s now back at NYFF with his 1977 set, politically-charged, mystery-crime-thriller, The Secret Agent, that, much like Gus Van Sant’s riveting Dead Man’s Wire, pays homage to the best films of the 1970s, specifically the work of Alan J. Pakula, Sydney Pollack, Sidney Lumet and Steven Spielberg. There are several major references to Jaws.
It’s also Brazil’s International Feature Oscar submission and is almost guaranteed a spot in the final five. And, like last year’s much deserved winner, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, it may even surprise in a few other categories, including Best Actor for Wagner Moura who won the award at Cannes. Filho took the Best Director trophy there, as well.
From the bizarro opening, which involves a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a decaying corpse and a corrupt cop, to the very next scene involving a dead shark with a hairy human leg stuck in it’s mouth, to a sequence a bit later where a movie theater showing The Omen has patrons wildly screaming and fainting, Filho is a master of narrative invention that continuously beguiles the viewer. And even at a 2-hour, 40-minute, running time, he leaves you wanting more.
Moura plays Armando, a left-leaning, widowed, university professor on the run from a bigoted government bureaucrat, who’s part of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The bigwig has hired two assassins to go after Armando, who is hiding out in Racife, under the alias Marcelo, with other political enemies of the state, thanks to a courageous 77-year-old known as Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, whose hilarious, plucky performance deserves Oscar consideration).
Meanwhile Armando visits his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes) who is being cared for by his thoughtful father-in-law (Carlos Francisco) until Armando can obtain fake passports so he and Fernando can flee the country.
The two hitters Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (stunning Gabriel Leone), are actually step-father and son, respectively. And they, in turn, hire another man to do their bidding. From there the frenzied insanity builds to several bracing climaxes.
Udo Kier has a brief but potent turn as a Jewish tailor with horrific bullet wounds who is bullied by the town police chief.
And I’m leaving out a lot of plot and a slew of subplots including a “hairy leg” that comes to life, and kicks a number of gay men having sex in a park—to death. But it’s not homophobic. It’s surreal. And the hairy leg was an actual urban legend at the time.
The many twists this brilliant film takes should not be spoiled. And as crazy crackers as it is in certain sequences, it never meanders or takes a wrong turn.
Filho deftly uses real events to tell a wildly imaginative fictional story that examines fascism, racism, superstition, religion, political values and power as well as father/son relationships. And the notion of mischief, which is introduced in the very first scene, is sprinkled throughout this sprawling story.
The charismatic and charming Moura is the glue that holds the entire epic together, giving us a complicated, layered portrait of a haunted man who refuses to compromise his ideals.
I left the press screening with this great big smile on my face, I didn’t even realize I had, until I overheard someone (probably a publicist) say to the person next to him, “Look at those smiles, I think they liked it.” I more than liked it. I felt this giddy sense of joy—the kind you can only get from experiencing a movie where the director is miraculously able to share their tremendous love for the medium via their own singular style of storytelling.
The Secret Agent is part of the Main Slate at the 63rd New York Film Festival.
For tickets and/or more info visit HERE.
