‘The Secret Agent’ review: Brazilian political drama balances rage with laughs

Drenched in sex and death, Secret Agent looks to the past to make sense of the present. The latest film by the famous Brazilian screenwriter and director Kleber Mendonça Filho begins with a dead body and ends with an elegy for another. Meanwhile, it tells the story of an ordinary man caught in the political turmoil in Brazil in the late 1970s. At once deadly serious and seriously playful, this Cannes Prize winner may have the trappings of a thriller, but Mendonça Filho sometimes flips the script, inserting saucy nods to raunchy B-movies or the occasional movie theater blowjob. “Secret Agent” doesn't twist so much as it gradually unravels, its full meaning unclear until the director eventually flashes forward nearly 50 years, putting the final piece of the puzzle into place.

Wagner Moura plays Armando, who travels to the city of Recife in early 1977. Stopping at a lonely gas station, he notices a corpse on the ground, barely covered with cardboard. “It’s been there for a long time,” the employee casually tells him. Perhaps the cops will eventually come and take him away. At this moment, the police arrive, but they are not here for the sake of the deceased – they are rather shaking Armando for a bribe. Mendonça Filho, who previously co-directed the feverish western “Bacurau” which simultaneously acts as a critique of inequality and colonialism, tells us everything we need to know about the time period we are about to enter. Welcome to the reality of a brutal dictatorship: life is cheap and you are on your own.

Armando doesn't need reminding. In reality, he is on the run, using the name Marcelo as an alias to hide from those in power who are looking for him. He was once a scientist, but that period of his life, as we learn through painful flashbacks, was destroyed, which forced him to change his identity and think about fleeing Brazil. But first, Armando must return his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunez), who lived with the parents (Carlos Francisco, Aline Marta) of his beloved late wife Fatima. He soon learns that hitmen have been hired to kill him on the orders of a corrupt government lackey whom he defied. Armando was involved in technological research; now there is a price on his head.

“Secret Agent,” which won directing and acting awards at Cannes, continues Mendonça Filho's trend of mixing genres. His films refuse to behave properly, leaving room for bizarre digressions and dark reflections on government oppression. (Playfully, the opening title card warns us that the film is set during a “period of great evil.”) Recently departed cult actor Udo Kier makes an appearance—his second appearance in a Mendonça Filho film—which only underscores The Secret Agent's unpredictability and, in hindsight, its sympathy for the ghosts that walk among us. The adventurous nature of the narrative comes to the fore when the action abruptly shifts to the present day, when young women listen to cassette recordings of our main characters. This abrupt digression will gradually develop into a decisive plot, allowing Mendonça Filho to build a thematic bridge between the past and the present.

The film is just over two and a half hours long, and as it unfolds it expands, introducing new supporting characters with their own stories. We meet Armando's other refugees, all chilling in an apartment complex run by a delightfully stern matriarch (Tania Maria). He takes a mistress (Hermila Guedes) and also confronts Fatima's wary parents, who suspect that their son-in-law cheated on her while she was alive. Mendonça Filho even spends some time with the hired thugs (Gabriel Leone, Roni Villela) who are sent to beat up Armando.

This panoramic view gives The Secret Agent a novelistic scope, although it sometimes dilutes the flow of events. However, this approach adds texture to the set during Carnival, the vibrancy of the festival pales in comparison to the creative exuberance on display. The film doesn't just celebrate Jaws – worldwide phenomenon – but also has a clever recurring shark motif. Brazilian pop hits grace the soundtrack, jockeying for space alongside Chicago epic If You Leave Me Now. The severed legs wreak havoc and cats with three eyes stop by. And again and again we see snippets of a mysterious contemporary storyline in which Laura Lufesi's diligent researcher studies Armando's trials, his desperate saga presented as ancient history.

If Mendonça Filho exaggerates his finished painting, it would be a fitting rebuke to the brutal regime that tried to mute his voice. He finds a worthy partner in Moura, who embodies the rugged sex appeal and muted melancholy of a principled man in a world gone mad. Handsome but haunted, Armando may be flawed, but his defiance makes him a reluctant hero. The film mourns all such political crusaders whose names we never knew, although its commentary is lighthearted. Even as this thriller reaches its shocking, time-shifting epilogue, Mendonça Filho's attitude is one of both wry resignation and anger. Our modern horrors will inevitably become yesterday's news. “Secret Agent” asks us not to let the voices of the past be silenced. They still have something to tell us.