Kleber Is a Good Storyteller

I rarely see a film twice. Not out of principle, but because cinema, when it truly works, leaves a residue that resists repetition. Yet The Secret Agent demanded a second encounter. This time it was circumstantial: my friend Andy was coming from Stamford, Connecticut, to see the film at Film at Lincoln Center—just across the street from where I live in New York—and sent me a message. The excuse was perfect.

Seeing a film for the second time is not repetition; it is displacement. Suspense dissolves, narrative urgency fades, and what remains is structure, rhythm, and intention. It is there—beneath the mechanics of plot—that Kleber Mendonça Filho reveals himself, once again, as a storyteller in the deepest sense of the word.

Storytelling, in the Northeast of Brazil, is not merely a literary practice; it is a cultural condition. Recife, Pernambuco, and its surrounding region have produced some of Brazil’s most incisive narrators of language, power, and contradiction. Ariano Suassuna (born in João Pessoa but inseparable from Recife), João Cabral de Melo Neto, Nelson Rodrigues, Osman Lins, and later telenovela writer Aguinaldo Silva all share an acute sense of drama rooted in social tension and irony. This lineage is inseparable from literatura de cordel and from repente, the art of improvisation—verbal duels in which performers create lyrics instantly, confronting one another in contests of wit, rhythm, and eloquence.

Kleber films as if he were listening to that tradition rather than quoting it.

One of the film’s central moral tensions is betrayal. This is not incidental; it is deeply Brazilian. Since Calabar in 1630—condemned by the Portuguese as a treacherous traitor and later reconsidered by some as a pragmatic figure resisting colonial injustice—betrayal has occupied a painful and unresolved place in Brazil’s historical imagination. Traitors are not merely disliked; they are culturally intolerable. The Secret Agent absorbs this legacy without turning it into allegory. Betrayal here is neither heroic nor fully condemned; it is structural, embedded in strategies of survival shaped by unequal power.

Social inequality, likewise, is never abstract. Kleber introduces critique without announcement. The upper class, when involved in crimes, continues to benefit from systems designed to protect them. This is not argued; it is staged. The camera observes how authority circulates, how guilt dissolves when it encounters privilege.

Recife itself is not a backdrop but a protagonist. The beaches are magnificent—almost aggressively beautiful—but danger is always present. Sharks, a real and persistent threat in that region, function less as metaphor than as reminder: violence coexists with leisure, beauty with risk. Carnival becomes the temporal core of the film. Not samba, but frevo—urgent, angular, breathless—structures the rhythm. Frevo is not ornament; it is tension in motion. Placing the main action during Carnival is a formal decision, not a folkloric one.

Music operates as historical memory. The appearance of the Banda de Pífanos—with their piercing bamboo flutes and heavy percussion—feels archaeological rather than illustrative. This sound belongs to the land, and Kleber allows it to emerge at precisely the right moment.

Objects carry ideological weight. Newspapers serve not only to bring news but also to cover a corpse. A radio slogan from the period—ending with “Pernambuco broadcasting to the world”—reappears like a transmission from another political imagination, when modernity still believed in its own voice.

The reconstruction of Recife in the 1970s is exact without becoming fetishistic. One scene remains particularly striking: the protagonist standing by an open window, looking out from the cinema where his father-in-law works. The open window matters. It allows sound, air, and history to pass through. The past is not sealed behind glass; it breathes.

Kleber’s attention to material detail borders on obsession. The Volkswagen Fusca is not merely present—it is economically situated. The cost of filling its tank matters. The restored Recife airport appears with precise period signage, evoking an era when infrastructure still carried ideological promise. Even Casa Mattos, the traditional store for primary and high school supplies, is included—not as nostalgia, but as evidence that memory is built from everyday commerce.

Sex is treated with the same cultural specificity. Brazilian sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is active rather than reactive. Desire is not hidden, and sex is not framed as transgression but as a beautiful, vital part of life. The sex scenes between the dentist and the protagonist are a masterclass in point of view. They are not about exposure but alignment—about where the camera stands, what it chooses to see, and what it allows the spectator to share. This is intimacy understood as cinematic grammar, not spectacle.

This is not nostalgia. It is method.

This text is the fourth I have written on The Secret Agent, and it still does not close the film. On the contrary, it confirms how resistant the work is to exhaustion. Three elements, in particular, demand a separate and sustained analysis: the cast, the sound, and the editing itself. The ensemble—carefully cast by Gabriel Domingues through a precise curation of professional actors and non-professionals—produces a density of presence rarely achieved in contemporary cinema. Alongside this, the film’s sonic construction, where music, noise, silence, and historical memory intersect, and its editing—governing rhythm, duration, and the circulation of meaning—stand among the strongest forces shaping the work. A fifth text will return to The Secret Agent once again, devoted entirely to these dimensions.