Swimming with sharks: "The Secret Agent"

The one unoriginal aspect of Kleber Mendonça Filho's generally astounding The Secret Agent is that it takes place in the Brazil of the late 1970s. If you begin to feel as though we've ventured this way before, and recently to boot, we have: in last year's I'm Still Here, another Brazilian history lesson that crossed the border separating the Oscars' Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture shortlists (and occupied more or less the same UK release slot). Yet that foursquare earlier film was what we might call a classical endeavour, the work of a seasoned movie veteran (Walter Salles) obliged to stay close to the contours of established biography and history. The Secret Agent, by striking contrast, is modernist fiction: expansive at 154 minutes, full of unexpected detours and deviations, an attempt not just to recreate and describe but inhabit a moment in which the country's democracy and citizenry were placed in supreme peril. This is unmistakably the bigger, fuller picture, undertaken by the same observant, story-hungry critic-turned-filmmaker who made the restless and rowdy Aquarius and Bacurau, emboldened here to take an even deeper rummage into and around his country's turbulent past. Mendonça Filho starts, however, with the simplest of images: a corpse lying on the forecourt of the Esso garage Wagner Moura's protagonist pulls into on Shrove Tuesday in 1977. ("A period of great mischief", as an opening title has it.) The corpse is the film's first sign of the craziness and carnage to come, and symbolic of what it might have felt like to pass through Brazil as it adjusted to and internalised military dictatorship. Life was going on all right - the film catches some two-and-a-half hours of it in a bottle, from carnival to chaos - but something somewhere was ever so slightly amiss. Any resemblance to life elsewhere in the West circa 2025-26 (or 2016-26, or - hell - 2001-2026) may not be entirely coincidental.

There are a lot of things in The Secret Agent that aren't where they're supposed to be, or where you'd expect to find them. In an early scene, the city of Recife's openly corrupt chief of police is called off a carnival float to investigate the case of a dead shark hauled into a classroom. The shark is revealed to contain a severed leg, which may have something to do with the shady types we encounter going around town tossing dead bodies into bodies of water. At the safe house to which Moura's Marcelo is travelling, there's a Janus-like cat with two heads, a trippy effect that may also be a cinema-obsessed filmmaker's arcane Jacques Nolot reference; Udo Kier pops up out of nowhere, in his final screen role as a German tailor who may have had reasons for fleeing to South America; and that severed leg will eventually assume a life of its own, booting film and viewer alike even further off the beaten path. In the meantime, you may even start to wonder what Marcelo is doing here, beyond being exceptionally charming to everybody he meets: the old dear who first takes him in, the upstairs neighbour he beds, the young son who's clearly been waiting for him, the colleagues at his new place of work, which happens to be a government building dressed up as something it's not. It's a puzzle, but the overall impression is that of a Brazil that's been forcibly stood on its head, shaking out all prior structures, mechanisms and certainties, the pieces left to fall where they may. It's down to Mendonça Filho to snap these scattered memories together, to find those internal connections that finally make The Secret Agent make sense. The shark, for starters, connects with the season's biggest cinematic hit Jaws, which has them queuing around the block at the Recife Odeon. A shifty-looking fellow, sat behind a desk, tells two hired thugs he wants someone to put a big hole in Marcelo's head at the very moment the latter is being checked for cavities by a dentist. Someone's in charge here, at least, and they're having a lot of fun making history rhyme, resonate and repeat itself in instructive ways.

The mischief of the period, then, extends to the filmmaking: it's infectious, and you catch it big time at the end of the film's first part - about 45 minutes in - upon the revelation that the above characters are being listened to on cassette by folks with smartphones. Mendonça Filho isn't here to torture or punish us - as so many contemporary arthouse directors do in hammering home a message - but he's also not averse to pulling the rug from under our feet or tossing in a sudden blindside. He needs us alert and on our toes, because something is unfolding before us, both on the cinema screen and in the wider world beyond it; the history bleeds through into present-day reality. Even so, The Secret Agent unfolds in such an idiosyncratic manner that it feels miraculous that it works. Its stroke of genius is to leave us to fend for ourselves for an hour or more in a world that's colourful and intriguing enough to keep us seated; let me tell you a story, the director states from the off, but I have to set the scene before I do. Only in the second hour, once a certain trust has been earned, does this script begin to explain what everybody's doing here, in the first scene where we see these characters sitting down for any length of time. Even the plot isn't where you'd expect to find it; as with the sunshine-yellow VW Marcelo putters about in, the film's engine is tucked away in the back. Still, what a caboose. You may well spend The Secret Agent's first half wondering where on earth this damn film is going. You will spend the second, and the gripping home straight especially, wondering why more films don't trouble to toss out the rulebook in such spectacular fashion.

I am aware that the above may make The Secret Agent sound tricky or hard work, yet nothing could be further from the truth; as with any good detective story, it takes some figuring out, but the clues are all there. Most visibly, Mendonça Filho retains a welcome eye for faces that tell half of the story before anyone's opened their mouth to speak. (The players deserve their 'You Have Been Watching'-style credits: Gabriel Domingues's kaleidoscopic casting makes Marty Supreme look like a late Nineties MTV movie.) And Moura - a little bit Ruffalo, a little bit Firth - does a lot with the codewords watchful and mournful; he's working harder than anybody else on the Best Actor shortlist to steady us, to provide a reassuringly fixed point, even as he shuffles through three different identities, distinguished by varying levels of hairiness. Like his Marcelo, who may also be known as Armando - as if his very name had been turned inside-out by all this brouhaha - you will still need to keep your wits about you: this is one of those grown-up, big-boy pictures your parents and grandparents may have told you about. But Mendonça Filho also pays us the compliment of recognising that history can be sprawling and complex and small and simple. A bust-up around a dinner table can have repercussions that last for years or decades; a life story can be told by two people either side of a desk. A whole nation can go doolally, and yet be brought back from the brink and restored to sanity by the actions (and sacrifices) of ordinary people. Take all that in your stride, and you will be entertained and stirred, perhaps even moved, by the sight of a small community uniting to resist tyranny, as well as educated as to why Brazil takes particular pains to lock up those authority figures who've been shown to engage in criminal activity: to deter others who would exploit and abuse, pillage and plunder. Draw your own conclusions - it's still, just about, a democracy - but there may be a wider lesson or two to be absorbed here.

The Secret Agent is now showing in cinemas nationwide.