With the Oscar-winning (but uneven) I'm Still Here (2024) sweeping awards seasons last year, historical dramas about life under the military regime in Brazil are so hot right now. Whether it's because of the increasingly repressive tactics taken by forces of the state in the US, or the always-evolving political history of Brazil itself, stories about the coup d'etat and subsequent twenty-year dictatorship continue to pique global interest.

In theory, director Kleber Mendonça Filho is just the man to take advantage of that global interest. His 2019 film Bacurau garnered a cult international following (and a Criterion streaming premiere) for its fantastical Western elements, and his entire young life through university was spent living in Recife under the regime.

Yet his finished product, The Secret Agent (in its original Portuguese, O Agente Secreto), lacks the clarity or pointedness the subject requires. Instead, the film meanders through vignettes of the "time of mischief," as a title card calls the late 1970s, tying them together with several hokey and unfulfilling plot devices.

One of the most effective such vignettes is the opening scene: a driver in a yellow VW Beetle stops for gas in rural Pernambuco, a populous state in northern Brazil. He spots a decaying corpse haphazardly covered with cardboard. Put off, he moves to leave, but an obese gas station attendant waves off the dead body and assuages the driver. Nonchalantly, he explains: the man tried to rob the gas station days prior, forcing the employees to shotgun him in the face. The cops haven't responded to calls, presumably bogged down with both other violent crimes characteristic of the period, and keeping the peace during the celebratory month of Carnival. Such is the decaying of public trust during the regime. To push the point further, a police car shows up as the attendant tells the story. Its two cops, though, show complete disregard for the murdered man; instead, they shake down the Beetle driver for a "donation" to the police fund and try to fine him for traffic infractions. Succeeding in nabbing his last cigarettes, they drive off.

When the driver arrives at his final destination in Recife, a few cigarettes poorer and clearly miffed by the whole interaction, we learn his name is Armando (Wagner Moura) and that he's staying indefinitely in a community home run by the gossipy older Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria). They hint at some greater scheme — she lets him know she's happy to "help the effort," and neighbors refer to them as "refugees" — but it's a while before we learn that he's a professor in a form of witness protection after being politically persecuted for his politics and academic research. With his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) and his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) nearby, Armando uses a fake identity, the bureaucrat Marcelo, to try to disappear. But machinations are in motion that threaten his life, with antagonists including a feuding executive (Luciano Chirolli), two hitmen (Gabriel Leone and Roney Villela), and a corrupt police chief (Robério Diógenes) closing in on all sides. 

Armando's arc is far less effective than scenes like the gas station one at conveying the pain and anxiety of living under a dictatorship. Too bad it's the bulk of the film. Unlike the inspirational real-life protagonist of I'm Still Here, for instance, Armando's "persecution" is vaguer and less sympathetic; the arguments made to him about why his research is being defunded, including that it's redundant to other labs and not in a commercializable area, seem largely sound, yet Armando treats them as an attack. Later, his relationship with his philanthropic beneficiaries is so laden with exposition it never foments an emotional resonance. And the conclusion of his story happens off-screen, as if even the director wasn't that invested. Compare that to sparkling episodes about shark attacks, German Jewish WWII survivors, barbershop murders, neighborhood romance gossip, and contract killing negotiations, and it's hard to see why Armando pulls so much screentime other than Moura's talent as an actor and everyman good looks. 

Not only that, but The Secret Agent relies on the crutch of a flashback framing mechanism that makes the film and its treatment of the protagonist even duller. Sequences in the 21st century speak to how quickly we can forget our personal and national history, but in an elementary way that culminates in a ham-fisted claim to the "power of cinema." Waiting a whole 158 minutes for the ending was a terrible payoff in a movie that could have had so many better outs.

The Secret Agent is a capably-made film; cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova's on-location shooting with 1970s Panavision lenses adds a real beauty to its depiction of Brazil, and an MPB soundtrack from Mateus Alves and Tomaz Alves Souza is undeniably groovy. But the real genius of its tapestry of life under a military regime is obscured by a convoluted and unpleasant political thriller.