Films to See This February

"Taken in at a home for political refugees by a gran (Tânia Maria) with anarcho-communist sympathies, Armando is rechristened Marcelo and handed a job at the local ID card office. Here he runs into the local chief of police, a Nazi wannabe who harasses an elderly man he assumes was a German soldier in the war (Udo Kier, unexpected to the last in his final film role.)"

"Mendonça's film is tense and surprisingly comic, conjuring a world where the grotesque rubs shoulders with the routine. It's charismatically performed by Moura, who plays Armando as a man who can't quite believe what's happening - never more so than in the brilliant opening scene, where Armando stops in at a garage only to find a dead body on the forecourt, lightly wrapped in newspaper."

Set in the waning days of Brazil's military dictatorship, The Secret Agent follows research scientist Armando Solimoes, wanted by police and fleeing São Paulo for Recife, where his son lives. Armando is sheltered at a home for political refugees, rechristened Marcelo, and given work at the local ID office. He encounters a Nazi-aspiring chief of police who harasses an elderly man, while a contact in São Paulo orders a hit with fake passports complicating escape. The film mixes tension and dark comedy, highlighting grotesque bureaucratic corruption, moral absurdity, and the personal disorientation of exile.

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