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

Drenched in intercourse and loss of life, “The Secret Agent” friends into the previous with a view to make sense of the current. The newest movie from celebrated Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho begins with a useless physique and ends with an elegy for a unique one. In between, it tells the story of an unusual man ensnared in Brazil’s political turmoil throughout the late Seventies. Each lethal severe and severely playful, this Cannes prizewinner could have the trimmings of a thriller, however Mendonça Filho often flips the script by inserting cheeky nods to schlocky B-movies — or the random movie show blowjob. “The Secret Agent” isn’t tightly coiled a lot because it regularly unfolds, its full which means unclear till the filmmaker ultimately hurtles ahead almost 50 years, snapping the ultimate puzzle piece into place.

Wagner Moura performs Armando, who’s driving to the town of Recife in early 1977. Stopping at a lonely fuel station, he notices a corpse on the bottom, the physique barely lined by cardboard. That’s been there for some time, an worker offhandedly informs him. Possibly the cops will come ultimately to choose it up. Simply then, policemen do arrive, besides they’re not right here for the deceased — they’d a lot reasonably shake Armando down for a bribe. Mendonça Filho, who beforehand co-directed the feverish sorta-Western “Bacurau,” which doubled as a critique of inequality and colonialism, tells us all we have to know concerning the time interval we’re about to enter. Welcome to actuality beneath a brutal dictatorship: Life is affordable and also you’re by yourself.

Armando doesn’t must be reminded. He’s truly on the run, utilizing the identify Marcelo as an alias to cover from these in energy searching for him. As soon as he was a scientist, however that point in his life, as we are going to uncover by means of wrenching flashbacks, was destroyed, forcing him to alter his id and ponder fleeing Brazil. However first, Armando should retrieve his younger son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who’s been staying with the dad and mom (Carlos Francisco, Aline Marta) of his beloved late spouse, Fátima. He quickly learns that hit males have been employed to kill him by order of a crooked authorities lackey he defied. Armando used to do expertise analysis; now, he has a value on his head.

“The Secret Agent,” which took directing and appearing awards at Cannes, continues Mendonça Filho’s tendency to combine genres. His movies refuse to behave correctly, making room for whimsical asides together with somber reflections on authorities oppression. (Impishly, a gap title card warns us that the film takes place throughout a “interval of nice mischief.”) The just lately departed cult actor Udo Kier makes an look — his second in a Mendonça Filho movie — which solely emphasizes “The Secret Agent’s” wild-card unpredictability and, retroactively, its sympathy for the ghosts who stroll amongst us. The narrative adventurousness involves the fore when the motion abruptly cuts to the current day as younger girls hearken to cassette recordings of our predominant characters. That jarring digression will regularly morph into a vital subplot, permitting Mendonça Filho to construct a thematic bridge between then and now.

Operating barely over two and a half hours, the movie expands because it unspools, introducing new facet characters with their very own histories. We meet Armando’s fellow refugees, all of them cooling their heels in an condominium advanced overseen by a delightfully crusty matriarch (Tânia Maria). He picks up a lover (Hermila Guedes) whereas additionally confronting Fátima’s cautious dad and mom, who suspect their son-in-law cheated on her whereas she was alive. Mendonça Filho even invests a while within the employed goons (Gabriel Leone, Roney Villela) despatched to whack Armando.

This panoramic sweep lends “The Secret Agent” a novelistic sprawl, though it generally dilutes the proceedings. That mentioned, the strategy provides texture to a movie set throughout Carnival, the pageant’s vibrancy paling compared to the inventive exuberance on show. The film doesn’t simply have a good time “Jaws” — a worldwide phenomenon — but in addition encompasses a intelligent recurring shark motif. Brazilian pop hits pepper the soundtrack, jockeying for area alongside Chicago’s schmaltz epic “If You Depart Me Now.” Severed legs wreak havoc and cats with three eyes cease by. And time and again, we see snippets of a mysterious modern-day storyline by which Laura Lufési’s diligent researcher research Armando’s ordeal, his determined saga rendered as historic historical past.

If Mendonça Filho overstuffs his achieved image, it’s a becoming rebuke to a violent regime that will have tried to tamp down his voice. He finds a worthy companion in Moura, who embodies the rugged intercourse enchantment and muffled anguish of a principled particular person in a world gone mad. Alluring however haunted, Armando could also be flawed, however his defiance makes him a reluctant hero. The movie mourns all such political crusaders whose names we by no means knew, though it wears its commentary frivolously. Even when this thriller arrives at its jolting, time-shifting epilogue, Mendonça Filho’s angle is as a lot wry resignation as it’s anger. Our modern horrors will inevitably develop into yesterday’s information. “The Secret Agent” suggests we not let these voices from the previous go silent. They nonetheless have issues to inform us.