The Secret Agent review: Wagner Moura in vivid portrait of life under an authoritarian, corrupt government

When you’re living inside a tempest of political, economic and environmental turmoil, it can feel like nothing has ever existed before or will again.

The present can be like blinders but it always serves us to remember that this particular era, as unique as it feels right now, isn’t.

That’s why memory is so important, and the erasure, denial or diminishing of past crimes is dangerous. History is one of the most contested spaces in a political context, and acts such as Donald Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is no small trifle.

Or when John Howard crusaded against what he called the “black armband” view of history, as the then prime minister continued to reject calls for a government apology to the Stolen Generation in favour of emphasising Australia’s “generous and benign” record of the past.

What we remember, how we remember matters. You can’t reconcile, move forward and recognise repetition unless you’re honest about what came before.

As a thriller, The Secret Agent is exciting and entertaining, an evocative piece of art that’s wholly lived in, plunging you into a messy and tense environment of political repression and fear.

But its real power lies in it being a piece of historical memory, a rich tapestry of what it feels like, not what it looks like, to live at a time when any small wrong move could get you killed, and your only crime was to stand up to corrupt forces enabled by a rotten, autocratic government.

Starring Wagner Moura (Narcos, Civil War) and directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, The Secret Agent hails from Brazil and is set during what it calls a “time of mischief”, that is to say, the Brazilian military dictatorship that ran from 1964 to 1985. The Secret Agent takes place in 1977.

The lead character, Armando (Moura), is a former professor and researcher hiding out in Recife, in the northeast of the country.

The city is a hotbed, crackling with the energy of Carnival but also more than a decade of a repressive regime. The discovery of a severed human leg inside the belly of a shark sends Recife into a frenzy, obsessed with this unusual story.

The local police chief, Euclides (Roberio Diogenes) is corrupt, preferring to hold court over his band of cops which includes his sons, and sowing chaos and violence. How The Secret Agent portrays the police is part of why this is such a potent film.

These scenes have a loose energy, an almost infectious kineticism, to highlight that in the bureaucracy of the dictatorship, he’s small fry. Almost everything he does is objectionable, whether it’s harassing a local Holocaust survivor (Udo Kier, in his final role) or telling an assassin he doesn’t want to know what he’s doing.

But it doesn’t bear the tropes of obvious menace, as you might expect, because Euclides is not unusual in this time and place. That’s just how it is.

Mendonca’s film is so good at establishing the vibrancy of a city still trying to get on with it even with the ever-present threat of the dictatorship. Life for its people doesn’t stop, it’s not always that dramatic, but it’s also not quite right.

There’s one scene of Armando, trying to blend in with the crowd at Carnival, gives in to a few moments of normalcy. He lets his body move in rhythm with the undulating revellers, as the camera captures him from above. But then he’s back to looking over his shoulder.

Armando is bunked up in a political refugees community where there are others, for various reasons, also trying to elude the authorities, and he works with the leader of a resistance movement to try and find a way out for himself and his young son, the latter is staying with his grandparents.

We discover through a gripping flashback just how Armando ended up in this position, and it’s as simple as he pissed off the wrong person – wrong in multiple senses of the word.

It’s an extraordinary performance from Moura, who gives the character a gentle, almost unassuming presence, but still holds every frame he appears in.

The actor blends an everyman quality with that of a person with strong convictions and the will to act, an effective way to say to the audience, this could be you, would you step up?

The Secret Agent’s narrative weaves from moment to moment with naturalism, as it luxuriates in the texture of the world, rather than rushing from plot point to plot point. It’s captivating but it can also feel long, and at two hours and 40 minutes, it is.

But it does a marvellous job of making vivid all the small and big things of living in a political machinery which ensures that even natural justice is repressed corruption and hate is so overwhelming, but there are always acts of resistance.

The film is specifically confronting the crimes of the military dictatorship in Brazil, which, by the way, was supported by the US at the time. But it’s also asking questions about how, even in very recent years, the country came to flirt again with similar ultra-right wing forces under the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

But these questions of historical memory and political authoritarianism are border-free, it’s for everyone.

Rating: 4/5

The Secret Agent is in cinemas