The Secret Agent: Survival takes a village

 

The Secret Agent, Brazilian Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorship, Brutality

What can I say?  The most succinct description of this movie comes from the brilliant reluctant wife who stated that the hero of this film, Armando, who has to go by the name Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura), is the secret agent because he doesn’t know that he is an agent.  What could be more psychoanalytic?  A secret agent who doesn’t know that he is?  It is very much like our experience of having an unconscious determining huge swaths of our experience and, because that agent is unconscious, we don’t know who is running our own show.

Like other films nominated for best film by the Academy (Bugonia, One Battle After Another, and Sinner, though Frankenstein and others could fit here) and other foreign films like The President’s Cake, this film is carrying a not so concealed message about the craziness of the times we live in, even though each is making tangential rather than direct commentary.  In this case, a Brazilian film, in Portuguese (with a little German) and with good subtitles, is talking about the period of craziness in Brazil during the 1970s and 80s.  My interpretation that it is commenting on our current experience could be projection – as is the case when making an interpretation in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis – and that means it could land, or not.  In this case, we’ll see if it squares with your take.  Because I am relying on that and don’t know that you will have seen this relatively obscure film, I will talk about many details in it.  If you intend to see it, you may want to stop here and return after you see it.

The events depicted in the film are not of earth-shaking consequence.  There is a contract made to take a person’s life and it is carried out.  This could just be a gangster film.  But it is not.  It is a film about what happens when the government, instead of protecting the people and supporting them in the moment, but also in the long term, becomes blind to what is going on or, more pointedly, becomes open to corruption and removes its oversight of human affairs.  I think it is no accident that the Academy nominated this film.  As splendid a film as it is – and it is a splendid film – it has essentially no chance of winning the award, but it is important that American audiences see it, and nominating it assures that at least some of us do that.  So, my interpretation of this being relevant may more accurately reflect the minds of the members of the academy than the film makers themselves, who may, frankly, be more interested in exploring the consequences of the lack of oversight in their country than in warning us about what will happen when we take our eye off the ball.

On the other hand, from my very brief sojourn in Nicaragua, where the US was on the front pages of the newspapers there every day, I am keenly aware that the rest of the Americas do have their eyes on us.  They know what is going on, and, having lived through corruption, I think they may well want us to know what it looks like. 

In this movie, a member of the privileged class, a scientist – not an award winning scientist, but a solid University professor scientist and department chair who has a patent to his name that would be of use to people interested in building an electric car – it has something to do with improving the functioning of a lithium battery – is pushed, along with everyone in his department, out of a job so that a pirate can “relocate” and use for profit the parts of the department that are useful to him.  He apparently has the ear of a politician or something that allows him to be a thug. 

The thing is, being a thug isn’t enough.  He feels insulted by the scientist and his wife, also a scientist in the same department.  He is angry enough at them that the scientist must go into hiding and take on an alias for fear that he will be brought up on trumped up charges and put in jail.  The wife has the good sense to die of pneumonia (please forgive my releasing her carelessly – she is only seen on screen in brief flashbacks – this is really a movie about the scientist) because the thug, not satisfied with upending the scientist’s life decides to end it.  Perhaps he fears that, if the scientist remains alive, he is vulnerable to being exposed.  We really don’t get to see what his motives are, just that he hires the hit men.

Perhaps the most engaging part of this film is the way in which what I have sketched out above emerges over the course of the more than two hours of the movie.  At the beginning of the film, we follow Marcelo on a trip through Brazil at Mardi Gras time in a yellow VW Bug, watching as a human who was murdered trying to steal from a gas station is left to rot in the sun, and as he is intimidated by highway patrolman who want him to bribe them to make them go away.  We feel disoriented and uncomfortable as he sneaks into what he equates to a US Safe house and connects with other “refugees”.  Some are legitimate refugees from other countries and some are refugees within their own country – as he is.  Minding his own business, operating his own department, he was not only thrown out of his job, but he is now a hunted man.

As I watched the film, I didn’t know how safe or unsafe he is.  The title of the film suggests he is a secret agent, but is he a spy?  I identify with him and I begin to feel unsafe and, as it becomes clearer and clearer that he is no more a secret agent than I am, I am brought into sharing his feeling of naivete, and therefore the feeling of uncertainty swells.  What have I done wrong?  Who can I trust?  Is there a rule of law in this country?

We might not think that could happen here, just as we might have thought the Chinese Cultural Revolution could not happen here, but after the events of the last year, as the chaos seems to increase day by day, as institutions of higher learning that are the envy of the world are held hostage by our President who is openly using his office to make money for himself, including by apparently selling state secrets to advance his own financial well-being among many other schemes, and who is regularly pardoning known criminals, how long will it be before people realize that they can get away with murder and how long after that will it be that they start acting on that?

Instead of “Marcelo’s” situation becoming clearer as the movie progresses, it becomes murkier.  “Marcelo” is set up with a job, apparently one he has asked for in the department of government that issues identity cards.  But that branch of the government is being used as a cover by a person who is presenting himself as the “Chief of Police”, but is he really?  He is deposing, in the government identification office, as if it were his own, a woman who did not tend to her servant’s child when she sent her servant out to get supplies.  The child wandered into the street and was hit by a bus.  Apparently, this “deposition” was staged so that the mother could arrive and complain like a crazy person, which the photojournalist could record, put in the paper, and sway public opinion away from the mother’s plight. 

Justice is apparently not blind in this corner of the world.  Indeed, it seems that justice may have taken to the streets, with public opinion about cases being more important than the jury – or maybe you sway the jury before the trial.  One of the chief of police’s misdeeds shows up in the form of a human leg in the belly of a shark.  Perhaps the body was chopped up and put in the sea?  In any case, the leg takes on a life of its own and, in one of the distracting scenes in the movies, hops around the park where couples meet to have sex interfering with their privacy.

Marcelo is offered a fake passport to help him get out of the country, but he is suspicious of the motives of the people supplying it.  None-the-less, he is interviewed and describes the events that led to his having to go into hiding.  We are confused and outraged by the thug’s behavior and that of his son as they steal the department from the man we now know is actually named Armando. We are also listening in with current day researchers who are listening to the tape of the conversation.  They, in turn, deliver to the tapes to Armando’s son, a physician.

The discussion between the researcher and Armando’s son helps clear up Armando’s interest in finding the identity card of his mother – she had been essentially a slave of his family with whom his father had an affair, and then he was raised by his grandparents as neither the maid nor the father were old enough to be parents.  Was she fired?  What happened to her?  And now, the son does not appear to be that interested in his father.  We saw his affection for the father when he was child, right before the father was murdered.  But now?  He has no memory of his parents – his grandparents raised him and are, effectively his parents.  The child is now a physician and he is running a blood bank.  Perhaps the filmmaker is trying to help him restore his interest in his father – and his country’s interest in what happened in a time that feels long ago and perhaps irrelevant.

The most poignant scene in the movie is when Marcelo, in a late evening hanging out with the other’s in the refugee building, lets them know his real identity in an act of trust.  They reciprocate, telling their own stories – and risking being ratted out by doing that.  We discover how diverse they are, the various types of corruption they are running from, but there is a greater sense of community – a feeling that others share their plight.  The woman who is the angel who protects them describes her own experience of surviving the Italian dictatorship during the war, she demonstrates that we can survive – and remember.  Perhaps know what others are going through can help us feel so not alone, and knowing that others have survived can help us feel hope, even during dark times.

I am finishing this post the morning after the Academy Awards.  The theme of the awards did parallel my reading of this movie.  The arts can help us remember who it is that we are and what it takes to get us through hard times.  In her acceptance speech for the first award for casting directors, the woman who was awarded (and everyone who was nominated was a woman) asked all the women in the auditorium to stand up – to thank them for their contribution to the industry and for their work together to make the industry a place where women’s contributions are recognized and valued.

  

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.