The Secret Agent

This political thriller draws upon motifs of carnival and film genre to evoke the paranoia, lawlessness, and inequality of 1970s Brazil.

Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura, right-centre) attracting the unwelcome attention of police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes, left-centre), and his sons Arlindo (Italo Martins, left) and Sergio (Igor de Araújo, right), in The Secret Agent (MUBI).

Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.

You can also support my work by making a one-off payment, at a price you consider affordable.

This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Content warning: Murder; Bereavement; Racism; Sexism; Descriptions of gore.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Secret Agent is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

---

During Carnival Week in 1977, widowed academic Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) arrives in Recife, where his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) now lives with Armando’s father and mother-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) and Lenira Nascimento (Aline Marta Maia). He does so under the protection of a dissident network opposed to Brazil’s ruling military dictatorship, having been dismissed from his post as a technology professor and subsequently unfairly persecuted. Armando and his late wife and fellow academic Fátima Nascimento (Alice Carvalho) had made an enemy of Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), an executive at state power giant Electrobras, who closed down their department.

Armando stays at a refuge operated by the elderly Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), which is also home to Angolan couple Thereza Vitória (Isabél Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário), as well as divorced dentist Claudia (Hermila Guedes), with whom Armando becomes romantically involved. Under the assumed name ‘Marcelo Alves’, he is placed in a position at the state’s National Institute for Identification (INI) office, where he encounters corrupt local police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes), and his son Sergio (Igor de Araújo) and adoptive son Arlindo (Italo Martins). Euclides takes a liking to Armando, who does not welcome the attention.

Back in São Paulo, Ghirotti hires former Army lieutenant Augusto Botha (Roney Villela) and his stepson Bobbi (Gabriel Leone) to assassinate Armando. Upon arriving in Recife, the two men hire a local gunman, Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio), to help them track down and kill their target. Armando learns from Elsa (Maria Fernanda Cândido), his contact in the dissident movement, that his life is at risk, leaving him perilously awaiting the imminent documentation that will help him and Fernando escape from Brazil – providing he can escape from the hitmen tasked with his murder.

Dictatorship, power, and inequality

The Brazilian dictatorship in The Secret Agent is ubiquitous, but hardly omniscient. It is a vast edifice, with concentrations of corporate power showcased by the INI – where the authority to record who has lived and died lies – and Electrobras. Yet the state’s gaze is essentially vacant, symbolised by Armando’s paradoxical penetration of the INI under a false identity. Rather, it is an infrastructure containing vast lawlessness, in which Armando’s life is threatened not by the regime, but by an officeholder’s grudge. Ghilotti had earlier mockingly branded him a communist, a judgement based less on Armando’s political ideals than on his appearance, the executive taking the academic’s long hair and beard as signifying a refusal to meekly accept his own authority. By contrast, the corrupt police chief Euclides, described with meaningful ambiguity by Armando’s contact at the INI, Anísio (Buda Lira) as ‘an imperfect man’, is a source of unwitting benignity and even assistance to the film’s fugitive protagonist.

Within this system, behind the façade of professionalism and officiality, the real order of things is composed of crude transactionalism and dynastic patronage. The Brazil of The Secret Agent is one in which individuals routinely court or are at least open to bribery for the misuse of their position or knowledge, or even more actively willing to do harm on behalf of others for the right price. It is one where fathers routinely recruit their sons into positions of influence, but also frequently potential personal and legal risk, as with Ghirotti and his son and right-hand man Salvatore (Gregorio Graziosi), or Euclides and Sergio and Arlindo, or hitmen Augusto and Bobbi Borba. It is a system that works through covert action and absence of oversight. Armando, with his close and protective relationships with both his father-in-law and son, and his place in a network of dissidents, mirrors and inverts this dominant framework.

This is symbiotic with Brazil’s deep, multifaceted, intersecting inequalities, brought into sharp relief by the proximity between those on either sides of this divide. How the worth of a person’s work and life are calculated, whether their existence and disappearance are duly recognised by the state, depends on class, geography, race, and gender. The wealth and power imbalance between its south and north is epitomised by Ghirotti travelling from Sao Paolo to disparage and terminate the work done by Armando and his department in Recife. The executive boasts of his Genovese heritage while throwing his weight around, a manifestation of neo-colonial power that recalls one Christopher Columbus. The Borbas put a higher price on Armando’s head due to his being white, but are only willing to pay Vilmar, a dark-skinned labourer, a fraction of this when they outsource the deed to him. Women’s work is also routinely devalued , as when we see Ghirotti, in flashback, deliberately belittle Fátima.

Carnival, film, and the politics of genre

The Secret Agent’s opening title describes its events as taking place during ‘A time of great mischief’. This is in part an assertion of historical periodisation, referring to the years of military dictatorship over the country, but equally draws our attention to the fact the film takes place during Carnival. In Brazil, Carnival operates both on the premise of separateness from the everyday, and yet also draws upon and partly constitutes it. It ritually dramatizes the reality of social relations, and yet refuses a sharp distinction between representation and represented. It holds the promise of inclusion and equality for the marginalised, and yet functions both through the operation of pre-existing hierarchies, as well as inversion of and resistance to them.¹

Carnival is therefore an apt metaphor for Brazil during the military dictatorship. It was born out of an apparent state of exception in 1964, but then persisted for two decades. It functioned both through authoritarian legalism and wholly outside the law. It exercised widespread violence and oppression, but was neither monolithic nor fully capable of containing resistance to it, and by the late 1970s entering its twilight years.² In the film itself, this dynamic is best captured in the figure of Euclides, who has two sons – one white, one Black – and whom we first encounter covered in confetti as he attends to a case straight from carnival, and who cheerfully predicts to Armando a rising death toll during the festivities, which his police are clearly contributing to.

The film also demonstrates its sense of the carnivalesque through the way it presents us with both a representation of 1970s Brazil through the prism of the period thriller, with its implication of historical accuracy, and equally draws our attention to its own artifice, through experimentation with genre conventions for purposes of political and psychological symbolism. Its paranoid atmosphere echoes the Hollywood political thrillers of the 1970s, which themselves articulated a sense of intelligence and security service overreach, partly in response to revelations about US involvement in overthrowing democratic governments across Latin America. Yet its very name overdraws this connection, calling attention to this title’s bland genericism and simultaneously its unrepresentativeness of Armando as protagonist.

The film also evokes the conventions of horror: Alexandre runs a local cinema currently screening Jaws, whose famous poster is a source of macabre fascination for young Fernando; simultaneously, in another subplot, Euclides’ sons aim to retrieve and dispose of a severed human leg that has turned up in the stomach of a dissected shark. This deliberately schlocky gore is thus a counterpart to the mischief of Brazil under dictatorial rule, and of carnival. The nightmarish abjection of the non- and no longer human communicates a patent wildness of society, and the capacity of the dead, of past violence and injustice, to haunt it in the present.

Technology, modernity, memory, and justice

Contra to the circularity of carnival time and the return of the repressed and the abject is the pursuit of modernity and the contestation of its meaning. The Brazilian dictatorship was in itself partly rooted in a modernisation project at odds with the pre-existing notion of Brazilian racial democracy, instead deeming the county’s racial heterogeneity and uneven economic geography as justifying an authoritarian, top-down, centre-out, programme of transformation, to remake the north-eastern periphery in line with the values and prerogatives of its European-descended southern elites.³ Yet the modernisation pursued by the dictatorship was hardly wholly distinct from the developmentalism of its left-leaning, democratic predecessor, or of explicitly socialist varieties pursued in other countries.⁴ After all, both Electrobras and the INI were founded prior to the 1964 coup. Moreover, countercultural elements in the country had their own understandings of what it was to be modern that challenged the underdevelopment paradigm.⁵

1970s Recife in The Secret Agent has many trappings of being too late, left behind. A slain corpse lays outside a petrol station at the start, waiting days for police attention. Alexandre’s cinema screen Jaws two years after its initial release. Ghirotti saw it as a backwater, and accordingly sought to impose limited horizons upon Armando’s university department, rejecting the viability of ambitious work he deemed more appropriately undertaken elsewhere. Yet he is challenged and affronted by Armando’s alternative, antiestablishmentarian modernity. Armando, who possesses his own transnational networks, academic and dissident; who drives back into Recife in his bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle; who uses the recently installed ‘orelhão’ public telephone booths to communicate with his confidants, while evading the attentions of his persecutors; whose own account of that persecution is captured for posterity by Elsa and her assistant through a tape recorder.

The memory work undertaken through technologies like the tape recorder or the birth or death certificate in The Secret Agent constitute claims on justice across time. As the political philosopher W. James Booth has argued:

We attribute to political communities an identity understood as a cross-generational enduringness of some broadly normative aspects of their existence: for example, a shared perception of justice, a constitution to express it, and its correlated institutional arrangements. That persistence makes a community the bearer of its past and the steward of its future, and gives it an enduring relationship to the absent denizens of both domains.⁶

Who gets to remember, who gets to be remembered, who tells their story, who is silenced – these are questions not only of justice, but also modernity, because the periodisation of the political community, the naming of the past and its crimes and their perpetrators and victims as such, is integral in order to ensure a different order of things in the present and into the future, with its foundational myths, with the absented as it sentinels. And yet The Secret Agent was made against the backdrop of the fallout from the attempted coup after Brazil’s 2022 Presidential Election, and its genre games evoke alternative temporalities, in which ‘the time of great mischief’ defies a clear beginning and end.

---

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please consider supporting my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.

You can also support my work by making a one-off payment, at a price you consider affordable.

Otherwise, please show your appreciation by sharing this post more widely, and referring the newsletter to friends.

You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:

1. Piers Armstrong, ‘Bahian Carnival and Social Carnivalesque in Trans-Atlantic Context’, Social Identities, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2010), pp. 447–469.

2. For an overview of Brazilian politics and society during this period, see Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America: Volume 9: Brazil since 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), particularly chapters 3, 5, and 8.

3. Col Tollerson, ‘Developing Democracy through Dictatorship: Race-Thinking, Modernization, and Authoritarianism in Cold War Brazil’ (PhD thesis, New York University, 2021).

4. Tobias Rupprecht, ‘Socialist High Modernity and Global Stagnation: A Shared History of Brazil and the Soviet Union during the Cold War’, Journal of Global History, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2011), pp. 505–528.

5. Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Brian William Bentley, ‘Pop Artists of Underdevelopment: 1960s Brazilian New Objectivity’ (PhD thesis, New York University, 2020).

6. W. James Booth, ‘“From This Far Place”: On Justice and Absence’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (2011), pp. 750–764 (p. 757).