O Agente Secreto
Humour and homages to horror films, in my political commentary? What’s this, Bergman? Coen-esque, the way every single bit part has some incredible actor going all the way.
The opening shot sets the tone. Our protagonist is driving his yellow Beetle for three days, and is about to run out of gas, so he stops in a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
He notices a dead body barely covered in a cardboard. The guy manning the station runs out from the back, puffing, begging him not to run off, he can fill his gas, no problem. Pay no mind to the dead guy, he tried to rob the station a couple days back, and the owner shot him twice with a shotgun. Since it’s the carnival weekend, nobody came over the deal with it.
After the gas is filled, a cop car shows up, it seems finally the station guy will have some reprieve from having a dead body stinking up the place and making all cars swerve into the road and run off. He also has to chase away the packs of stray dogs trying to eat it!
The cops arrive, but they don’t let our protagonist go, they ask him to stay. Turns out they did not came because of the body, it’s really about the yellow Beetle with capital plates. It’s a shakeup: they verify everything thoroughly, to see if they can fine him for something. The cop asks him to get out of the car, so he can check the dates on the fire extinguisher.
When nothing comes up, the cop outright asks for the citizen to make a contribution to the police relief fund. Our protagonist just spent all the money on gas, so he only has a half-finished pack of smokes. They keep that, and they let him go.
What does that have to do with the rest of the film? Literally nothing, there’s a lot of this kinds of vignettes spread all around.
There’s a framing story too, the outer plot is about a young college student transcribing some tapes with our protagonist telling his story. That only appears towards the middle.
This is actually set in the northeast of Brazil, a rural area, away from the central decision-making places. Our protagonist is a college teacher, married to another teacher from the university, and they have a small kid.
One day, a bigwig that owns some chickenshit company, but manoeuvred into controlling the big state monopoly of energy comes visit the university, since that public company gave some money to maintain the public university.
Our protagonist is the head of department, so he receives the guests (the bigwig and his failson), and things start off in the wrong foot. He arrives and immediately mocks his long hair, makes a “joke” about him not bathing, implies he a bum for not working in the private sector.
He takes this dude to dinner, with his wife, but since she is black, the bigwig is absolutely insulting, calling her a secretary and worse. She abandons the table in disgust. After more insulting back and forth, they just leave, but first the wife comes back and lays it down thick, they won’t take this shit from some sleazy bastard like him. Blows are exchanged, nothing too intense.
The next day he visits the university, and speaks some atrocious English to be racist to the face of a British visiting professor Sanjay. The purpose of his visit is closing everything down and take the money back to Rio, he says they are wasting money, and collaborating with foreign universities. There’s still a military dictatorship, the communist threat is alive and good.
After his wife died, the son is living with the grandparents, but he comes back with a fake name since there is some organisation that helps people being threatened to run away. They are all stationed in a big apartment building, manned by an hilarious old lady. That organisation is taping their stories, and making sure they can leave the country safely, with fake papers. It takes a while.
While he is waiting, the bigwig sent two goons to kill him, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty, they hire a local. Just like they did with their boss, he bumps up the price, since the target is not “poor people”. Our protagonist has a job in the ID card office, and the hired gun just straight up gets there, checks him out, then calls the guy for confirmation. He uses his real name, so our protagonist asks for help from a local cop, and there’s a shootout in the courtyard.
The bumbling cops get shot in the face, the hired gun runs off, injured. The hiring sidekick is around, chases him, but he’s also dumb and gets shot. What an idiot.
After that, the focus switches to the present day, the researcher find a paper with a photo of our protagonist killed in the streets. She tracks down the little kid, and delivers him the audio, but he doesn’t remember much. The blood bank coworkers play a prank of her, making her donate blood before seeing the doctor, but she donates anyway.
All in all, this is very understated, the plot is never fully revealed, it’s very much impressionistic. The period piece element is great, everyone has weird clothes, doesn’t use many buttons on the shirts, and sweats a lot.
His father in law is a projectionist, so we get plenty of scenes in the cinema. People are losing their shit over The Omen, and the little kid is scared of the Jaws poster, after hearing an human leg was found inside a shark.
There’s a scene that strays into outright farce, where a disembodied leg comes to life and attacks a bunch of people knowing one another (in the biblical sense) in a park. This seems to be a direct retelling of an actual newspaper article, reported as “news”.
It’s much better than Bacurau, Udo Kier is a Jewish émigré this time. The Tropa de Elite references are avoided, the protagonist is just accused once of having a cop face and a cop name.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.