Meanwhile, a existent shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is simply a quality limb recovered successful the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous main of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), heads consecutive from his ain Carnaval revels, covered successful confetti and lipstick stains, to spot the limb astatine an oceanography lab, wherever he’s joined by 2 different officers—his grown sons, Arlindo (Ítalo Martins) and Sérgio (Igor de Araújo). Euclides hopes to support the find retired of the property for reasons that soon go evident: a brace of deed men, a stepfather (Roney Villela) and stepson (Gabriel Leone), are moving successful municipality with the police’s tacit approval, dumping bodies from a span into the oversea below.
However censored the Brazilian property was astatine the time, disappearances are inactive making the news, including that of a pupil who hasn’t been seen successful respective days—the dismembered victim, it’s hinted—who’s the taxable of an nonfiction that appears successful the film’s 2nd part, “Identification Institute.” The rubric refers to a authorities bureau for issuing I.D. cards, wherever Marcelo, present neatly dressed and good groomed, begins an bureau occupation arranged by a well-placed sympathizer (Buda Lira). Marcelo has an further motive for moving there: by searching the institute’s archive, helium hopes to capable successful long-troubling blanks successful his household background. At the office, the communicative menacingly triangulates, with Euclides turning up arsenic portion of an underhanded ploy to assistance a affluent pistillate portion denying a mediocre 1 justice. He befriends Marcelo—even as, during nocturnal rounds, helium pals astir with the deed men.
Mendonça, who is fifty-seven, grew up successful Recife and has centered his feature-film vocation connected the city, probing its authorities and powerfulness dynamics successful the dramas “Neighboring Sounds” (2012) and “Aquarius” (2016). He took thematic detours successful “Bacurau” (2019), a futuristic phantasy acceptable successful a fictitious colony elsewhere successful the authorities of Pernambuco, and “Pictures of Ghosts” (2023), a idiosyncratic documentary astir Recife’s movie theatres. “The Secret Agent” is by acold his astir accomplished movie to date, and the lone 1 acceptable during the epoch successful which helium grew up. The movie’s carnal plan conveys delight, wonder, and bitter nostalgia; it feels rooted arsenic successful representation and research, aesthetic imaginativeness and governmental conscience. With his prime of period-specific flourishes—Marcelo’s yellowish Volkswagen Beetle, the office’s manual typewriters nether integrative particulate guards, sidewalk wage phones surrounded by modernistic bubblelike booths—the manager embraces the fashions and euphony of the clip without losing show of the brutal misrule associated with them.
Mendonça loves process, and successful “The Secret Agent” helium draws retired scenes astatine length, unfolding games of concealment and evasion with understated precision and overwhelming tension, dispensing harrowing accusation with pinpoint restraint. His filmmaking teems with memorably eccentric details that reverberate with thematic significance. One of the movie’s astir striking scenes is simply a funny digression stemming from a triviality—a telegram that Marcelo sends to a benefactor (Marcelo Valle) whose telephone is apt tapped. Mendonça shows the telegram astatine each signifier of its journey, arsenic 1 clerk takes the message, different transmits it, a 3rd prints it astatine the different end, and past a messenger carries it folded betwixt his fingers to the sympathizer’s office. The oddly jaunty sidebar is capped by a chilling surprise: the addressee is shocked to find that the telegram has already been opened.
Paranoia suffuses the movie without showiness oregon bombast—there are nary distorting angles, nary dunning philharmonic cues. The ambient panic emerges alternatively successful the cautious behaviour of characters successful the crosshairs, arsenic successful 2 lengthy and finely wrought scenes—the movie’s mightiest affectional pillars—that amusement Marcelo talking with others nether suspicion. In the first, he’s met, successful a covert location, by a pistillate named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), who informs him that he’s facing a decease threat. He, successful turn, tells her the communicative down his persecution, a communicative involving immoderate of the authoritarian regime’s predatory profiteers, and, successful truthful doing, offers a poignant representation of an erstwhile ally, his precocious wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho). In the different specified scene, residents of the harmless location clasp a spontaneous support-group session, during which Sebastiana, the matriarch, is asked astir an aged photograph connected her mantel and responds with an aria-like reminiscence of her grimly romanticist governmental past.
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