The Secret Agent movie review: Wagner Moura commands political thriller about life under dictatorship

Still from The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent is set in Brazil in 1977, when the country was under military dictatorship, described as a ‘period of great mischief' by the film's intertitle. Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a widower who is on the lam, arrives in his hometown, Recife, to reunite with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who lives with his late wife's parents. Marcelo is provided refuge by the kind and spirited Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria), who harbours a couple of other political refugees in her building. The fugitives celebrate the Carnival exuberantly, though their lives are under threat by the dictatorship.

Ironically, living under a fake alias, Marcelo (whose real name is Armando), gets a job at a state identification office, and makes it his mission to find his late mother's ID card in the archives. As the film unfolds, we learn why Marcelo, despite not exactly being a dissident, insurrectionist or even a secret agent, as the title suggests, finds it necessary to flee the country. The film is divided into three parts, and fragments of Marcelo's life under the military dictatorship are reconstructed by two college students in the present, through audio recordings made by the resistance group.

The narrative is haunted by death. The film opens with an abandoned and unclaimed corpse rotting at a petrol pump that Marcelo pulls up at. A casualty of the Carnival, the body is covered with cardboard, with a swarm of flies hovering above and a pack of dogs attacking it. Two police officers show up, not to check the corpse but to intimidate Marcelo and ask for a bribe. The sequence is morbid and macabre, with a touch of black comedy, effectively crystallising the theme of the film.

The motif of the severed leg keeps appearing throughout the film. A severed human leg is found inside the stomach of a beached great white shark; a disgustingly gory spectacle. It captures the attention of the locals as they are swept in a shark mania, including Fernando, who insists on seeing Jaws despite having nightmares from its poster alone. As the local police department, headed by Euclides (Roberio Diogenes), continues killing people using the chaos of the carnival, the leg takes on a life of its own. The press sensationalises it into an urban legend, spreading rumours of a supernatural "hairy leg" hopping around at night and attacking people.

Wagner Moura's performance is a highlight. He displays immense range, portraying Marcelo with a cloak of hurt, vulnerability and weariness along with a sense of urgency looming over him.

Director Kleber Mendonca Filho underscores the socio-political turmoil by focusing on common people, whose very existence is reproached by the despotic state. The pacing is slow, allowing viewers to absorb the milieu and observe the characters to add to the realism. Each frame is packed with colour and sensuous details.

Akin to the conjoined cat in Dona Sebastiana's apartment, Filho's narrative always seems to be looking two ways. The opening montage of snapshots mixes the personal and political. Scenes of violence are interspersed with anarchic humour. The raucous Carnival music saturates the air, people dress up in folk costumes and jubiliate in pagan revelry while a newspaper headline announces that the Carnival death toll has risen to 91. The Secret Agent's brilliance lies in the way the incongruent details come together to form a bigger picture.