'Secret Agent' has the trappings of a thriller but whimsy as well

It centers on ordinary man who gets pulled into Brazilian political turmoil of the 1970s.

- TIM GRIERSON

Drenched in sex and death, “The Secret Agent” peers into the past in order to make sense of the present.

The latest film from celebrated Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho starts with a dead body and ends with an elegy for a different one. In between, it tells the story of an ordinary man ensnared in Brazil’s political turmoil during the late 1970s. Both deadly serious and seriously playful, this Cannes prizewinner may have the trappings of a thriller, but Mendonça Filho occasionally flips the script by inserting cheeky nods to schlocky B-movies — or the random movie theater blowjob. “The Secret Agent” isn’t tightly coiled so much as it gradually unfolds, its full meaning unclear until the filmmaker hurtles forward nearly 50 years, snapping the final puzzle piece into place.

Wagner Moura plays Armando, who is driving to the city of Recife in early 1977. Stopping at a lonely gas station, he notices a corpse on the ground, the body barely covered by cardboard. That's been there for awhile, an employee offhandedly informs him. Maybe the cops will come eventually to pick it up. Just then, policemen do arrive, except they’re not there for the deceased — they’d much rather shake Armando down for a bribe. Mendonça Filho, who previously co-directed the feverish sorta-western “Bacurau,” which doubled as a critique of inequality and colonialism, tells us all we need to know about the time period we're about to enter. Welcome to reality under a brutal dictatorship: Life is cheap and you're on your own.