★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
“The Secret Agent” is a great movie. And we’ll get to that in a hot minute. But first take a look at this photo of the film’s leading man Wagner Moura. That’s a movie star, right there. Already established in his native Brazil, Moura broke through wider in the Netflix series “Narcos” as drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Now, having already won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for “The Secret Agent,” an Oscar nomination is the next step. Just watch, it’ll happen. Years from now, Hollywood historians may try to pinpoint the precise moment when Wagner Maura became an actor with real romantic sizzle. It comes in quietly, in a flirtatious sliver of erotic possibility that he flashes at Maria Fernanda Cândido as a resistance fighter. Time stops just long enough for him to establish an electric current of connection. And there it is, a link from Bogart to Moura. And now back to our regularly scheduled review.
The setting is Brazil in 1977, “a time of great mischief” according to an understatement on the title card in “The Secret Agent,” a mesmerizing mind-bending of a political thriller that delivers all the tension you could ask for and then flips the cards. And there’s Wagner Maura as Marcelo Alves (not his real name, so don’t get comfortable with it), a widower and former research scientist back in his hometown of Reclife, known as the “Brazilian Venice” for its canals, bridges and side streets. It’s the week of Carnival, when music and dancing fill the streets and around every corner is somebody who’d like to kill Marcelo for the sins of his past.
Maybe that description makes you think you’re in for 007 romp with a Brazilian touch. Not bloody likely. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is a world-class filmmaker from whom you learn to expect the unexpected. He’s availing himself of 158 minutes of slow-burning screen time to create an absurdly funny, scarily surreal spellbinder, alive with tension and stunning period detail, that will plunge us into a life of fear and trembling under a blazing sun.
Take a look at leading man Wagner Moura. That’s a movie star, right there. An Oscar nomination for 'The Secret Agent' is the next step. Just watch, it’ll happen.
In the opening scene, Marcelo pulls up to a gas station in a yellow VW Beetle only to find a dead body rotting in the heat with flies buzzing, feral dogs barking, and two cops ignoring the body to nose around his car as if they expect to find the murder weapon.
The strange gets stranger after that. You can hear screams from the local cinema, always a touchstone for Mendonça Filho, now showing “Jaws” and “The Omen.” Cut to an absurdist scene in which a hairy leg pulled out of a shark’s belly starts kicking to life with vengeance on its mind, especially against gay men cruising the parks.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Marcelo is risking a return home to Recife, buckling under the boot of a military dictatorship, to reunite with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes who’s mad eager to see “Jaws,” a film forbidden to him that makes seeing it feel like delicious sin).
The irrepressible, 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (the awesome Tânia Maria) provides refuge for both Marcelo and his boy, along with other political dissidents with the help of Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), a resistance fighter with a talent for fake IDs and passports.
Marcelo’s show job as an archivist doesn’t fool Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone), two hitmen sent to kill him by a lawman with a grudge against Marcelo. People are disappeared every day in Recife, so it’s not as if anyone would notice his absence.
Not surprisingly for this filmmaker, his devotion to the church of cinema radiates through every frame. Best known for the neo-western “Bacurau” and “Pictures of Ghosts,” a documentary that revolves around movie theaters, Mendonça Filh builds the action to the breaking point.
Marcelo’s protective father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a guardian for Fernando, is a projectionist at a cinema palace that doubles as a meeting place for insurgents and includes Udo Kier as a tailor whose scars reflect his history as a Holocaust survivor. Kier, who died this week at 81, is the kind of risking-taking actor that Mendonça Filho reveres.
“The Secret Agent” spins itself into many a dizzying corner, but always with a purpose. In a present-day coda, we see the adult Fernando, now played by Maura, discover a path to remembering, the kind Mendonça Filho finds in films and the palaces that house them. Together with the soulful Maura, he shapes his bawdy, brilliant, conscience-haunted “Secret Agent” into a thing of beauty and terror that just might last.