The Secret Agent review: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘stylish and vibrant political thriller’ could be an Oscars contender

Set in the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, this buzzy crime drama, which has premiered in Cannes, “makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety” and “bursts with sex, shoot-outs and sleazy hitmen.”

One of the biggest sensations of this year’s awards season was I’m Still Here, an Oscar-nominated drama about the cruelty of the military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil. Now there’s another film with the same subject matter – and it, too, could make a splash when awards season rolls around again. That’s not to say that The Secret Agent is quite as sensitive as I’m Still Here, but Kleber Mendonça Filho’s stylish and vibrant political thriller makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety. Set in the northeastern city of Recife during the raucous week of carnival celebrations, it bursts with sex and shoot-outs, sleazy hitmen and vintage cars – and it features a severed human leg which is found in the belly of a shark. You’d have to assume that Quentin Tarantino is already the film’s number-one fan.

Still, for all its brightly coloured, grindhouse flashiness, The Secret Agent is rooted in the real anxieties and tragedies of ordinary citizens. Indeed, its hero isn’t a secret agent at all, even if Wagner Moura (Civil War, Narcos) is as tall, dark and handsome as any of cinema’s super-spies. He plays the mild-mannered Marcelo, who is first seen driving into Recife in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. It’s about an hour before his identity and back story are revealed – The Secret Agent doesn’t go anywhere in a hurry – but we eventually learn that he is a widowed academic who objected to a government grandee’s attempts to steal his patented research. A big mistake. Marcelo now plans to reunite with his young son, who has been living with his in-laws, and to obtain the documents he needs to leave the country. In the meantime, he works undercover in a public records office, where he hopes to find even a shred of official evidence of his late mother’s existence, and he stays in a dissidents’ safe house overseen by a wonderfully chatty seventy-something mother hen (Tânia Maria).

Even before he reaches Recife, Marcelo happens upon a corpse on a petrol station forecourt, which no one has got around to removing, so he isn’t naïve about life in what an opening caption waspishly calls “a period of great mischief”. But he is shocked when he hears that his old adversary has hired two assassins to track him down, and he is appalled by the amorality of the local police chief (Robério Diógenes). Filho and his cast have a gift for creating characters who are either movingly honourable or grotesquely evil. The police chief falls into the latter category. When he reads a newspaper headline stating that 91 people have died during the carnival, he cheerily bets that the total will soon reach triple figures.

Despite all the danger and corruption in the humid air, Marcelo has an amused tourist’s eye for Recife’s eccentric goings on. He laughs in disbelief at a cat with two faces, at his son’s obsession with seeing Jaws at the cinema, at the number of people having sex in public places, and at a surreal urban legend about the aforementioned severed leg hopping back to life and kicking the men in a cruising ground. For some viewers, The Secret Agent will have a few of these humorous detours too many. Running at more than two-and-a-half hours, it rambles here and there, hanging out with the numerous characters who dream of escaping from Brazil, like the patrons of Rick’s Café in Casablanca.

But one of the film’s key themes is the question of what is remembered and what is forgotten, and Filho, who grew up in Recife, seems intent on putting all sorts of quirky details on celluloid lest they be erased forever. As well as imbuing his hardboiled espionage yarn with richness and comedy, these lovingly realised period details add to the quiet melancholy that Moura radiates: one way or another, Marcelo won’t be in Brazil to enjoy these sights for much longer.

Anyway, just when The Secret Agent seems to be drifting too far from its central plot, it jolts back into focus, as the hitmen dump a body off a bridge, or an enigmatic contact promises to forge Marcelo’s passport. An expertly choreographed chase through the city streets makes for a superb, bloody climax, but, as in I’m Still Here, there are still haunting questions to be answered and mysteries to be solved. For one thing, whose leg was that in the shark’s belly, anyway?