If you've spent any time in a dictatorship — I've had that happy experience — you understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy. You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption and a sense of free-floating anxiety.
You get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent, an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Set in 1977, near the middle of his country's two-decade dictatorship, this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency.
The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Moura — who became famous in the U.S. in Narcos — stars as a research scientist called Marcelo, an innocent man on the lam for reasons we only learn later. He heads to Recife, a coastal city in northern Brazil, to pick up his young son from his late wife's parents and then flee the country together.
Marcelo takes refuge with Dona Sebastiana, a deliciously free-spoken septuagenarian who's at once a real pistol and something of a saint. Her apartment house is a secret sanctuary for people in various types of trouble.
As Marcelo makes his escape plans, we also follow the bad guys — a couple of hit men from down south and Recife's gleefully crooked chief of police, who's a blast to watch even though he's a monster. We keep waiting for, and fearing, the moment these villains find Marcelo.
Adding to the craziness, Recife is right in the middle of carnival and a bout of public hysteria about a man's severed hairy leg that has supposedly come back to life and is attacking the local citizenry.
Now Mendonça began as a critic and his tastes run from art movies to shoot-em-ups. Even as he honors the thriller genre by slowly building suspense, he tells his story with an auteur's freedom and looseness, leaping around in time and often stepping away from the plot to show us the interesting textures of Brazilian life — a gay cruising area, a local movie theater, a murdered body that's been lying outside a gas station for days.
Mendonça is a loyal son of Recife, and his first major film — 2012's Neighboring Sounds — used his own residential block as a metaphor for 21st-century Brazil. Here he goes back in time to bring alive the city's swirling history.
From its cafes and apartments to its dingy alleyways and spectacular vistas, no movie this year has such a warmly detailed and loving sense of place. Mendonca's Recife is a vibrant, racially mixed place where good and bad live side by side. In the movie, its carnival is an eruption of samba and alcohol and joy that also — newspaper headlines in the film tell us — leaves 91 people dead.
Like a political thriller from the 1970s Hollywood, The Secret Agent presents us with an X-ray of society from its highest reaches to its darkest corners. It's hard to imagine a richer cast of characters, each individualized and respectfully given their humanity — be it the hitman who bristles at his employer's offhand racism, the Jewish tailor scarred with World War II bullet holes, the smug tycoon getting rich off the the dictatorship, the secretary who has the hots for Marcelo, or Marcelo's late wife, who appears in only one scene — but she, and that scene, are lacerating.
Stitching it all together is Moura, whose shape-shifting performance is a triumph of watchful subtlety, so quietly warm and sympathetic that we're with him the whole way. There may be no better piece of screen acting this year than the one in which Marcelo first meets his fellow residents at Dona Sebastiana's. Moura's amused, melancholy gaze takes in each of them in a precise, generous way that makes you realize the kind of big soul he actually has.
The Secret Agent makes clever use of the movie Jaws, which Marcelo's son wants to see even though the poster gives him nightmares. In a way, Mendonça's movie works like Spielberg's. We keep wondering, with mounting dread, if and when Marcelo will get caught. But here, of course, the danger comes not from a real shark but from a political one, a military junta where the rich and powerful feel entitled to crush anyone who merely offends them.
At one point, eluding his pursuers, Marcelo steps onto a street filled with carnival goers ecstatically partying. He has a drink and briefly joins in the dancing, and we realize how happy his world could be if only those in power weren't trying to kill him.
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