Movies about resisting tyranny rarely inspire mirth much less transform a gnawed-off human leg into a kicky joke. For his latest knockout, “The Secret Agent,” the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror. Opening in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the movie largely steers clear of the corridors of political power and instead takes place in the sun and on the ground, where people live in the here and the now. Some celebrate Carnival barefoot, joyfully dancing together in the dust, while others are felled by violence, their blood seeping into the dirt.
There’s an air of desperation about Marcelo, a melancholic beautifully played by Wagner Moura, when he drives into the city of Recife soon after the movie opens. A former university professor, he has traveled to this northeastern city on the Atlantic coast seeking refuge. There, he sets up a new home and his situation gradually comes into focus along with his past life. The loss of his wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), who died tragically, hangs heavily over him, while their young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), a cheerful child who lives in Recife with his maternal grandparents, seems to be Marcelo’s strongest tether to the future.
Written and directed by Mendonça Filho, the story circuitously tracks Marcelo’s during his time in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco. It’s a city that the filmmaker has repeatedly returned to, including in “Aquarius” (2016). In that movie, Sônia Braga plays a music critic fighting to hold onto her coastal apartment, the same one that Mendonça Filho grew up in and where he made his first movies. It is also the locus of “Pictures of Ghosts” (2024), his poignant mediation on the physical and mental spaces that he’s inhabited, starting with the rooms that his mother made into a home and which became his portal to the larger world.
Threatening shadows hang over that world in “The Secret Agent,” despite the often dazzling sunlight that finds a corollary in the warm alliances that Marcelo makes after he arrives in Recife. He first connects with Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a tiny, birdlike woman with a deep, croaking voice redolent of unfiltered cigarettes and straight whiskey. She’s the contact for a smattering of other political refugees in the building, a lively hub despite the fugitives’ plight and anxiety. When Marcelo arrives, some are outside the building with other men, women and children celebrating Carnival, playing music, dancing, drinking and romping. It’s an exuberant group, one whose life force is a reproach to larger, murderous forces at work.
The dictatorship is ever-present in “The Secret Agent,” an era that Mendonça Filho with coy understatement introduces at the start of the movie as “a period of great mischief” and which he makes vivid through the characters’ lived experiences. Shortly after Marcelo moves in, he begins working in a state identification office, a cheerless space where the walls are ornamented with portraits of Brazil’s president, Ernesto Geisel, the fourth of the dictatorship’s five military leaders. At one point, Marcelo reads a newspaper, a page with the headline (“Debate on democracy”) facing the camera. He doesn’t need to read about the reality that he is living through, mostly in fear but also with moments of happiness.
Those moments — joyful, sexy, boldly funny — are critical. Death haunts “The Secret Agent” from the start amid surprising comedy. Shot in widescreen, the movie opens on a panorama of Marcelo pulling up to a rural gas station in his Volkswagen Beetle. It’s once upon a time in Brazil and, as Marcelo parks, Mendonça Filho lowers the camera for a closer look, reframing the shot to reveal the dead body of a would-be thief covered in cardboard. The corpse’s dirty feet are sticking out from under the cardboard and foregrounded so they’re facing you as if in salutation. A swarm of flies is buzzing above the body, and a pack of dogs runs over too. There’s a spooky everydayness to this morbid tableaux, and a touch of queasy humor.
This eccentric opener sets the fluctuating mood and tone in a story that is occasionally punctuated by shocks of comedy so absurd it can make you gasp with laughter. As Marcelo settles into Recife and his story emerges — as you learn who he’s running from and what he’s really doing in the information office — Mendonça Filho folds in scenes from other time periods while bringing the present to rich, emphatic life. It’s a present that is most touchingly conveyed by its characters, including a tailor, Hans (Udo Kier), a Holocaust survivor who stands up to a posse of bullying cops. (Kier, who died Nov. 23, was also in Mendonça Filho’s art-house exploitation shocker “Bacurau,” a 2020 neo-western co-directed by Juliano Dornelles.)
Hans appears only briefly, but his visceral presence — the anger in his face, the wounds on his body — is representative of Mendonça Filho’s narrative strategy. Part of the movie’s pleasure is the densely textured richness of its world, which he builds with colorful faces, a cavalcade of brightly hued V.W. Bugs, period-specific music (Gal Costa included), numerous cinephile references (Spielberg’s “Jaws” is one touchstone) and even hairstyles. The flowing soft curls of Fatima’s hair are one emblem of Brazil’s diversity, while the ugliness of its despotic power is expressed by the insult that a thuggish white man lobs at her during a dinner. When she leaves to calm herself, Mendonça Filho cuts to Marcelo, whose hair, beard and even the tilt of his head now recall Che Guevara at his most iconic; all that’s missing is the signature beret.
Mendonça Filho’s emphasis on resonant and sensuous details strengthens the movie’s realism, and underscores that this isn’t a story about state and institutional power. It is, rather, about commonplace people whose existence is a rejoinder to, and at times a bulwark against, the depredations of that power. Some of the characters are just getting by, paying silent witness to what’s happening, while others dance and still others resist the state. That fight takes many forms and is partly embodied by some fixers who help Marcelo. Yet while he’s on the run, Marcelo isn’t a canned version of a heroic revolutionary. He is, as he movingly asserts, an innocent, ordinary man who has been inadvertently swept up in a national horror.
If that sounds too heavy, consider the severed human leg that appears sticking midway out of a dead white shark in an early disgustingly gory, joltingly funny scene. The leg proves to have a mind of its own, so to speak, and before long it goes (hops!) places that another, less audacious filmmaker would never dare take it. Mendonça Filho (a former film critic), though, is nothing if not adventurous; he’s a glorious nonconformist. Here, as in other of his movies, he ignores niceties and genre hierarchies, embraces high and low, and mixes the refined in with the crude, an approach that is at once aesthetic and ethical. Here, life can be brutalizing, but there is also love, song, the hot sun, cold beer and, of course, there is also Carnival.
The Secret Agent Rated R for bloody violence. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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