The opening credits to director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” set the scene as Brazil, 1977, and then add, “a period of great mischief.” And that might be an appropriate capsule description of the film itself, a mischievous romp that includes secret identities, corrupt cops, intricate schemes, Carnaval frivolity, a severed leg inside a shark’s stomach, some very bloody and brutal action, a deliberately garish ’70s cinema style and a bit of thoughtfulness and emotion spread out over almost two and a half hours.
Does it all hold together? Nope. “The Secret Agent” is all over the place – not literally, since like almost all of Filho’s films, it takes place in the Brazilian city of Recife, his hometown – and cohesiveness or coherence are not high on its list of attributes. But its messiness is part of its charm and part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish grand guignol splatter-fest.
The director draws his inspiration from his memories of Recife in the late ’70s, from his mother’s work as an oral historian and from the style of some cinema of the era, with oversaturated, vivid colors. There’s nothing subtle about the way “The Secret Agent” is shot, with the bright and grungy movie screaming ’70s before you even know what it’s about.
What it’s about, though, is Marcelo (Wagner Moura), a tech researcher who arrives in Recife during the riotous Carnaval week. Marcelo is fleeing something, but we’re not sure what, as he takes lodging in a nondescript building populated by colorful characters (including a cat with two faces) and overseen by an old woman who seems to be harboring plenty of secrets of her own. But especially in the early going, Marcelo’s story is just one of several narrative strands that remain stubbornly independent of each other: the corrupt policemen, their even more corrupt bosses, the human leg that’s found inside a shark’s stomach, the two guys who seem to be very good at disposing of other bodies…
It all begins to merge when those disposal experts are hired to hunt down and kill Marcelo by a powerful businessman that Marcelo had opposed when the guy tried to shut down a research institute years earlier. But Recife during Carnaval isn’t the easiest place to find somebody, and the vibrant soundtrack of Brazilian music amps up the celebratory vibes except when Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves’ score edges in to give the film a sense of ominous foreboding.
But no sooner has the film settled into this ’70s thriller vibe than a couple of young women show up sporting iPhones and Apple computers to help them listen to recordings made by Marcelo and others back in the day. It’s a jarring change that feels as if it comes an hour or so into the film’s running time, and then the women disappear for another long stretch; if they feel like odd, superfluous additions to the narrative, they’ll eventually prove not to be completely extraneous.
By the way, there are no real secret agents in “The Secret Agent.” Marcelo, if that’s his real name (spoiler alert: it isn’t), is given a job in an office that pretends to be a police station but isn’t, while a scenery-chewing Udo Kier pops in to show off all his scars and people mutter conspiratorially to Marcelo, “It’s foul play at the highest level” while the score gets extra melodramatic.
There are flashbacks, there’s a weird fantasy sequence involving that severed leg running amok in a park full of people having sex, and there’s a manic shootout that takes gleeful delight in showing exactly what bullets do to flesh, at least in an action-movie-fever-dream kind of way. For a director who made his name with the intricate and brilliantly understated “Neighboring Sounds” in 2012, “The Secret Agent” is unexpectedly wild and florid — though to be fair, Filho was heading in that direction with his last narrative film, 2019’s feverish western “Bacurau.” (His last Cannes film, though, was the 2023 documentary “Pictures of Ghosts,” a much more measured tribute to the movie theaters of his home down, one of which serves as a crucial setting in “The Secret Agent.”)
The ending brings back one of the modern-day researchers and gives Moura something new to do. It aims to be a more reflective and emotional coda, and it gets close to succeeding in that. But coming just half an hour after a crazed bloodbath and a sex-park romp by a severed leg, it’s hard to find your way to reflective and emotional. 1977 was apparently a time of too much mischief to pull off that kind of tonal shift.
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