O agente secreto

1977, Zeit der brasilianischen Militärdiktatur. Eine Atmosphäre von Gewalt und Unterdrückung liegt über Recife. Marcelo sucht in der Stadt Ruhe und Zuflucht, er will zu sich kommen. Es ist Karneval, im Kino läuft Spielbergs JAWS, während die Stadt von einem Männerbein, das im Inneren eines Hais gefunden wurde, in Atem gehalten wird. Repräsentanten eines korrupten politischen Netzes vermuten in Marcelo einen Geheimagenten. Delirierend taucht er immer tiefer ein in die Stadt und die persönlichen Erinnerungen von Mendonça Filho, der nach O SOM AO REDOR (2012) und RETRATOS FANTASMAS (2023) den 1970er Jahren in Recife diesmal einen Thriller widmet. (Dunja Bialas)

Brazil, 1977. A corpse lies in the street for days without anyone showing concern, least of all the police. Hitmen drive to a dam in the middle of the night and drop a body into the water. Human remains are found inside the belly of a shark. No wonder that the opening scene of O AGENTE SECRETO describes the period setting, midway through the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, as “a time of great mischief”. Less interested in a history lesson than evoking what life was like back then, Kleber Mendonça Filho conjures a mood of pervasive paranoia, corruption and violence. With novelistic sweep, he brings together a large number of characters in a tangle of narrative strands that gradually converge around Marcelo, a university professor who is on the run after getting on the wrong side of an oligarch. The introduction of a timeline set in the present, in which a scholar attempts to reconstruct Marcelo’s story from surviving evidence, reflects Mendonça Filho’s own effort at salvaging historical memory. Cinema plays a key role here, both in this endeavour and within the narrative itself, as an artistic means of sharing and remembering stories, and as a physical space for collective dreaming. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)

Kleber Mendonça Filho (Auswahl): A MENINA DO ALGODAO (2003, K), VINIL VERDE (2004, K), ELETRODOMÉSTICA (2005, K), CRITICO (2008), LUZ INDUSTRIAL MAGICA (2009), RECIFE FRIO (2010,K), O SOM AO REDOR (2012, K), A COPA DO MUNDO NO RECIFE (2015,K), AQUARIUS (2016), BACURAU (2019, KO-REGIE), RETRATOS FANTASMAS (2023)