At the Montrose Playhouse, behind the last row of seating in each of the three screens there is a booth, just wide enough for one person to clamber into by ladder, which houses the sophisticated digital equipment demanded to project the day’s programming. But in military-dictatorship Brazil of the nineteen-seventies, a less modest projection room is furnished with a three-piece suite, kitchenette, and hidey-holes, and is used at times for clandestine resistance. In “The Secret Agent” (MUBI), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, the ever-preoccupied head projectionist connects the subversives, while his sweaty deputy, who frequently works topless, is a turncoat who pockets a brown envelope stuffed with notes as payment for divulging what his boss is planning—which is to rush his son-in-law out of Brazil to dodge a bullet with his name on it.
This is where I would have started “The Secret Agent.” The challenge with the first third of the film, “The Boy’s Nightmare,” is that it introduces a Chinese-menu-sized hodgepodge of characters—on all sides—whose connection with each other takes a lot to parse. (A number congregate around the house of an elderly Italian lady.) A good many things puzzled me. But the story takes off in a more straightforward manner in Part Two, from 1974. Ghirotti, the boss of mining-conglomerate Electrobras, purges an university department of its entire academic staff, headed by the projectionist’s son-in-law Armando, played by Wagner Moura, who is “of the hairy type,” and who is known elsewhere in the film as Marcelo, a pseudonym. Ghirotti demands they hand over the prototypes to an electric vehicle, seizing the public money earmarked for the university for an “industry makeover”; Electrobras will press its mined lithium into a wildly profitable enterprise. As he fires the academics, he compares their backward, rural surrounds with superior, forward-looking São Paulo; “Bulls, goats are relevant [here],” he says. “This is a regional centre. You have so many problems of your own to solve.”
In the projection room some time later, Armando meets Elza, a resistance-movement leader, played by Maria Fernanda Cândido, who brings a tape recorder. She is gathering evidence to denounce Ghirotti. Armando continues the story by recounting the events of the hours following the campus meeting. First, Ghirotti plays the tempter—“Did you ever consider working in industry?” Inviting Fátima, Armando’s steadfast wife, to join them for dinner, Ghirotti objectifies her—“She started as your secretary didn’t she?” [she didn’t; Fátima is a teacher]; “What a beautiful woman you have!”—but Fátima spits back. “Control your woman,” Ghirotti says, before dropping his Italian credentials into the conversation, “You have no idea who you’re messing with, boy,” he says. “That is a man,” Fátima says, pointing at her husband. Armando snaps off Elza’s tape recorder. “I am not a violent person,” he says, “but that man—I’d kill him with a hammer.” “What he does is treason,” Elza says. But “two men have been hired to come to Recife to find you. That’s not good.” Ghirotti has arranged hitmen. “A guy like him,” the killer says, “as you know it’s more expensive.” Ghirotti waggles his index finger around his mouth. “I want a hole in his mouth,” he tells the killers before accepting the inflated price. “Make him a dummy. You understand?” (The next scene shows Armando having his teeth examined; he’s hooked up with a local dentist who gives him a checkup in bed.)
“Jaws” was released in 1975; Armando’s son is prohibited from watching it as he is too young. Instead, he devours cartoons of sharks alone in his bedroom. Meanwhile a human leg is discovered inside the stomach of a dead shark in Recife’s oceanography institute. Euclides, the chronically corrupt police chief, played by Robério Diógenes, bribes an embalmer at the morgue to open the drawer containing the leg so that a goon can exchange it with that of a horse and then toss the real leg into the sea. The newspaper spies a commercial opportunity—“This is gonna be huge, huh?”—and creates a cartoon character under such headlines as “the hairy leg strikes again.” The “hairy leg” develops life —“Addams Family”-style—and terrorises a group of gay man meeting in secret at a park.
Strutty Euclides, while asserting that “I haven’t worked my arse off all my life to…,” in fact lubricates his lifestyle with good-old-fashioned shakedowns—like the one that opens the movie, at a lonely Esso filling station, outside which is a newspaper-wrapped corpse which has been there “since Sunday” and that “started stinking yesterday.” A cop tells Armando, “You can trust me!”—meaning to not plant drugs or a handgun inside his motorcar during an inspection—but there’s a catch: how about a donation to the “force’s carnival fund?” The opening scene also showcases a ground-level camera angle—of which the filmmakers are fond—which emphasises the peril for Armando of six-foot-high crops all around the asphalt. No witnesses.
“The Secret Agent” is the second film about nineteen-seventies Brazil to be shown at the Playhouse within the last year; I reviewed non-fiction “I’m Still Here” in March 2025.
The filmmakers are master moralists. The stand-ins for the whole regime are a police chief and well-to-do businessman, rather than the military. The stand-in for something sound and decent is Armando, who would have most likely fallen out with the dictatorship someday, and whose life is reduced to that of one man condemned to death. “The Secret Agent” undoubtedly takes patience, stamina, and willingness to concentrate. Like a thousand-page Russian novel, it is the vast cast of characters, rather than, say, the landscape, that accounts for the film’s long duration. By the time they snake into town, Armando’s executioners have heard all the excitable stories; “There was once a leg swallowed by a shark?” one asks. But Chief Euclides has not been slow to grasp the pocket-lining upside; he is already spinning history, swapping the spools of film for the next movie. “A tale for the tourists!” he says.
Adam Poole
15th March 2026
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