Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, retaliated fiercely against whoever contested its monopoly over the country’s public image. Opponents of the regime were kidnapped, tortured, and in some cases disappeared. Artworks deemed subversive or morally corrupt were banned and censored, if not destroyed. At the 1967 São Paulo Biennial cops stormed the exhibition hall to confiscate Cybèle Varela’s O Presente, a box-shaped sculpture holding a painting of Brazil turned sideways and a military bust emblazoned with medals. Two years later the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro was arrested and detained for approving an exhibition of young Brazilian artists who had been selected to show their works in Paris.

And yet movie culture flourished during military rule, particularly in the economic boom period of the Seventies. In 1969 the government had set up a state-run film agency, Embrafilme, to steer popular culture, but the company also consolidated the industry and provided Brazilian filmmakers with unprecedented levels of financial and institutional support. The content police weren’t terribly sharp: crafty directors with radical agendas—like the Cinema Novo stalwarts Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos—could use symbolism or formal experimentation to smuggle politics into the films they made on Embrafilme’s dime. Meanwhile Cinema Marginal, a defiantly lowbrow and low-budget film movement that had originated in the slums of São Paulo, infiltrated the counterculture via leftist student groups and underground film clubs. Its junkyard aesthetic—blatantly vulgar characters and anarchic formal strategies—was intentionally indigestible, a kind of middle finger to the snobs and elites.

Not that going to the movies was a marginal activity. In 1976 Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands—an erotic comedy in which a young Sônia Braga is haunted by the sexy ghost of her first spouse—sold over 10 million tickets during its extended run, breaking a domestic box-office record that remained unsurpassed for over three decades. Before the recession (and the proliferation of VCRs) in the Eighties, cheap Brazilian-style sex comedies, or pornochanchadas, dependably put asses in seats—as did brawny Hollywood imports like Jaws (1975), whose success inspired homegrown spoofs like the killer cod movie Bacalhau (1976).

All of this is to say that the strange, sad, and riotous events of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent could only happen then. The film takes place in 1977 during a sweltering carnival week in Mendonça’s hometown, the northeastern coastal city of Recife, where shark attacks are indeed a problem, and where three out of the director’s four previous features are also set. Mendonça was just a child in 1977, which aligns his experience of the dictatorship with that of nine-year-old Fernando (Enzo Nunes) rather than that of the film’s melancholic hero, Fernando’s father Armando (Wagner Moura), a university researcher who finds himself unjustly placed under a federal travel ban and forced into hiding. Throughout the film he strives to reunite with his son, desperate to break the cycle from which he himself suffered. Armando didn’t know his own mother and spends much of his time in Recife scouring a public archive for proof of her existence. But he knows that he and Fernando can only live safely abroad, for which he needs to acquire fake passports. The boy appears onscreen only a handful of times, both reminding Armando of the life he lost and sustaining his hope that it might be regained.

To Fernando, who lives with his maternal grandparents, his father’s persecution by the state feels distant and opaque. A more pressing concern might be Jaws, a film he has yet to see—Armando deems its salty spectacle too violent—but whose promotional images, his grandfather explains, have managed to infiltrate his fantasy world. The shark floats through his nightmares and recurs in his crayon drawings, larger than life.

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Mendonça was a film critic and programmer before breaking out as a filmmaker with Neighboring Sounds (2012), which unfolds in the same upper-middle-class neighborhood he grew up in. Recife and the movies are his lodestars, the coordinates he uses to map out the past. In his documentary-memoir Pictures of Ghosts (2023), he resurrects the city’s historic movie theaters using archival footage and home-video clips that trace its upheaval under the pressures of growth and capital. The movies are timekeepers, he explains in voiceover: Point Blank (1968) was playing when the military government issued AI-5, a decree that suspended constitutional guarantees and kicked off the regime’s darkest years; it was a sign that the regime’s grip was weakening when Hair (1979), despite a government ban, became a hit.

Only a cinephile—a real film nerd—could think this way, so it’s a good thing that Mendonça is unabashed. John Carpenter is one of his heroes. Bacurau (2019), a pulpy anticolonial western about villagers forced to retaliate against a group of tourists who mean to hunt them for sport, uses a synth track credited to the American director; the town’s school is called “João Carpinteiro.” In Neighboring Sounds we get Hitchcock-style voyeurism and Hanekian unease; Braga channels Bette Davis in Aquarius (2016), a feminist melodrama that doubles as a haunted house film.

Mendonça is not exactly a critic-turned-filmmaker in the same spirit as the directors of the French New Wave, who in their early years tended to translate reality itself into the language and history of the movies. Since at least the 1920s, Brazil’s modernist avant-garde has made a practice of antropófagio—the “cannibalizing” of foreign influences to create a kind of utopian synthesis. If Mendonça’s perception of his homeland as a chaotic and alluring shadow world proves well suited to the stylized aesthetics of Western genre films, his ravenously referential cinema also appropriates those genres to transmit a reality in which northern Brazil and its people hold the center.

This is not a modest undertaking. The varied forms and figures that course through Mendonça’s films stand as something of a corrective to the idea that Brazil, with its immense diversity and deep social contradictions, could ever be pinned down. No single consciousness can carry the weight of the country’s history. But the past can still be put to liberatory ends. In the final images of Bacurau the townspeople—Black and brown, old and young—have vanquished their imperialist invaders and now stare grimly at their final victim, the group’s leader (the late Udo Kier), as they bury him alive in an underground cellar. Their clothes stained with blood, they brandish the weapons they’ve retrieved from their local history museum, which keeps a record of past invasions and acts of resistance. These collective memories aren’t fuzzy and nostalgic; they’re a means of survival.

Northeastern Brazil, home to much larger Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous populations than the rest of the country, must wage a particularly passionate battle to protect its cultural heritage and regional history from the amnesiac mechanisms of the state. As of last November the right-wing demagogue Jair Bolsonaro, who spent his four-year presidency shepherding fringe conservative groups toward electoral legitimacy, has been serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for attempting to overturn the results of the 2022 elections. But Brazilian politics still bears the trace of his movement’s antidemocratic rhetoric, which whitewashes the country’s history of slavery and Indigenous genocide and minimizes—even celebrates—the military regime’s brutality. (Bolsonaro had made a habit of praising known torturers and slandering victims.) These threats to memory have hardly spared the country’s cinematic history: the Bolsonaro administration doubled down on spending cuts to the Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest film archive in Latin America, pausing its regular maintenance operations and eliminating its technical staff entirely. Almost a year later a fire tore through the institution’s highly flammable collection of nitrate and acetate film materials and documents, wiping out the bulk of the Embrafilme archive.

Less spectacular but comparably devastating is the destruction wrought by the country’s aggressive modernization schemes. Tasked by federal and municipal authorities with upgrading infrastructure in Brazil’s major cities, public and private companies have launched “urban renewal” projects with a priority on commercial growth and the comfort of the middle class. Public gathering spaces are being slowly eliminated: loiterers and miscreants scare off the tourists. For a sentimental Recifense like Mendonça this sort of development amounts to a kind of hostile takeover: in Aquarius the mighty Braga plays a retired music journalist who resists the mercenary real estate developers scheming to force her out of the beachside apartment she’s inhabited for several decades.

But it’s not all rage and handwringing. Mendonça is as interested in safeguarding the past as he is in mourning it. A howling Weimaraner named Nico, an infamous presence on Mendonça’s real-life residential block, attains immortality in Neighboring Sounds, while Pictures of Ghosts preserves downtown Recife’s shuttered cinema palaces in amber, juxtaposing footage of the theaters in their prime with shots of the churches and shopping malls they became. Braga’s Clara, for her part, knows that her apartment will no longer host the kinds of bustling family reunions captured in the film’s prelude, when her husband was still alive and her children still young. There’s an academic quality to Mendonça’s treatment of history, but there’s an intimacy, too, in his attention to odd details and his impressionable archivist’s mind. “It may seem like I’m talking about methodology,” Mendonça says in voiceover at one point in Pictures of Ghosts. “But I’m talking about love.”

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Truth, not facts, is important here. Mendonça’s work at once memorializes endangered Brazilian social dynamics and mythologizes them, filtering them through the intuitive registers of style and genre. For all the brooding naturalism of Moura’s performance, Armando has the cool swagger of a Steve McQueen. He enters The Secret Agent like a tropical outlaw, pulling into a desolate gas station wearing aviator sunglasses, leather sandals, and a half-buttoned shirt. (That US audiences are likely to know Moura from his beefy role as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix show Narcos, which launched his Hollywood career, invests his character here with a further layer of star power.) A dead body lies inexplicably before him, and soon two shady cops appear and randomly inspect Armando’s vehicle, all but ignoring the corpse. The scene feels like something out of a western: a lonely rider, a dirt road teeming with menace.

As the film goes on, however, it starts bearing a closer resemblance to paranoid American thrillers of the Seventies, such as The Parallax View (1974) and The Conversation (1974). Like those films, it plunges its hero into a vast network of conspiracy and violence. We eventually learn, in flashback, that Armando ended up on the run after his lithium battery research caught the attention of the state-owned power company, Eletrobras. When an Eletrobras executive named Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) paid a visit to Armando and his team, he openly insulted them—the northeast being a backwater undeserving of investment—even as he tried to usurp their research for the company’s gain. Armando and his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) refused to give in, and soon Fátima died mysteriously, forcing Armando to flee to Recife for safe haven under the alias Marcelo. All this emerges only halfway through the film, when Armando recounts his past to Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), a member of the resistance—though “resistance” is perhaps too concrete a term to describe the loosely associated group of good samaritans leading Armando through the dark.

Brazilians tend to wing it, Elza explains; their lack of resources demand improvisation. This isn’t Washington, D.C., with its vast, oppressive exteriors and suited-up Agent Smiths. Mendonça conjures menace in local terms: Armando has a hostile encounter with a masked man in a carnival costume who later appears in one of his nightmares; police examine a severed leg found inside a shark’s bloody carcass; at the movie theater where Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), Fernando’s grandfather, works as a projectionist, Armando witnesses a woman seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. “It’s this movie,” explains Alexandre, pointing out from the projection booth to a packed screening of The Omen (1976). (Burly Alexandre is unmistakably modeled after Mendonça’s late friend Alexandre Moura, one of the most indelible presences in Pictures of Ghosts.) The success of The Exorcist (1973) had initiated a cycle of satanic panic films, which played particularly well in Brazil, as in other Latin American nations where folk traditions and Catholic beliefs inform the way people make sense of their lives.

In any case, the devil’s involvement may have seemed like a reasonable explanation for the scale of repression Brazilians suffered under the military regime. The film mediates that brutality with a certain lightness of touch. We see portraits of Ernesto Geisel, Brazil’s dictator at the time, on the walls of public buildings, but otherwise Mendonça avoids the usual shorthand for life under authoritarianism—foot soldiers, armed checkpoints, patriotic radio broadcasts. The opening montage, a slideshow of Brazilian cultural luminaries, situates us in the popular dreams of everyday life. Armando listens to music (Lula Côrtes and Chicago), goes on scenic drives with his son, starts a fling with a single mom living in his apartment building. The word “mischief” is employed throughout the film to describe the whirlwind of violence then commonplace in Brazilian life thanks to men like Ghirotti, who hires a pair of hitmen to track Armando down. Standing up to these villains is not a heroic task; it’s just the game that must be played.

Tonal consistency, that lame critical virtue, has no place here. With a jazzlike trajectory, The Secret Agent spins free of a traditional suspense plot, ambling across the city with patience, curiosity, and humor. One digression slips fully into the fantastique: in the film’s most triumphantly gratuitous scene, the severed leg comes to life as a scratchy stop-motion vigilante assaulting lovers in a cruising park. Mendonça, who cut his teeth as a director making ultra-low-budget shorts with transparently cheap effects, has recounted in interviews that he derived this shlocky detour from a local myth invented by journalists in the 1970s as code for police violence in Recife’s queer spaces.

Another swerve takes us into the home of an eccentric exile who would rather be left alone. Euclides (Robério Diógenes), the crooked chief of police, and his two minions all but force Armando to join them on their visit to the German tailor Hans, played again by Kier, the cult movie legend who died at eighty-one late last year. Casually patronizing, Euclides has invented a fiction about the older man’s Nazi past, coercing him to show off his wounds like a circus freak. In fact Hans is a Jewish immigrant who survived the camps. Euclides finds him in his cramped second-story atelier with his lover, a Black Brazilian man, with whom he has a tender exchange in German. “I’m doing this for us,” he tells his partner as he reveals his scars. “This idiot ensures you and our protection.” Under the scrutiny of these rotten authorities, staying slippery means staying alive.

In the community where Armando lives in hiding, he’s surrounded by other political refugees, fellow victims of authoritarian caprice. We meet a married couple in limbo after fleeing their native Angola, which descended into civil war after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the safehouse’s septuagenarian landlord, regales her young neighbors with stories of a past life in 1930s Italy—Brazil being home to the largest population of people of Italian descent outside of Europe. Instead of explaining these dense lineages, Mendonça relies for drama and texture on the expressive presences of his actors. The Secret Agent, as with all of Mendonça’s films, is full of marvelous faces: a portly gas station attendant, a security guard who hooks up with sex workers on the clock, an industrial laborer hired by the hitmen to do their dirty work. The film’s eagerness to register these faces—to hang out, if only for a moment, with the characters floating through the central drama—comes to seem like a response to the era’s obscurity, its missing people and lost stories. As the hitmen draw closer Armando’s search for his mother’s documents grows more desperate, an obsession that prolongs his time in Recife and ends with his murder.

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Last month Mendonça curated a series at Film at Lincoln Center called “The Secret Agent Network.” It gathered films that had some influence on his latest feature, from Point Blank to the Jaws cash-in Orca (1977). Among them was Man Marked for Death/Twenty Years Later (1985), by the documentarian Eduardo Coutinho. Arguably the defining work about the military dictatorship, the film chronicles the long aftermath of the murder of the peasant labor organizer João Pedro Teixeira by police forces in a rural part of the northeastern state of Paraíba. Mendonça, in the series notes, called it “my favorite Brazilian film.”

Coutinho started shooting Man Marked for Death in 1964 in Pernambuco, whose capital city is Recife. Initially envisioning the film as a reenactment of Teixeira’s life and work, he enlisted a cast of non-actors that included Teixeira’s wife, Elizabeth Teixeira. The production was suspended after the military coup, but two decades later Coutinho resumed filming, using the footage from 1964 to stir the memories of several of the film’s past participants. Elizabeth had gone into hiding shortly after the coup, leaving behind eleven children (one of whom, the eldest, would commit suicide within a year of Texeira’s death). In 1984 several of them testify before Coutinho’s camera that they have no recollection of their mother.

Mendonça was raised by his mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian who produced testimonies such as the ones in Coutinho’s film. She recorded interviews with all kinds of Brazilians, aiming to create a collective people’s history. Mendonça honors this sort of work in brief, time-collapsing interludes that punctuate The Secret Agent: periodically the film cuts to a pair of researchers in present-day Brazil listening to recordings of Armando’s conversation with Elza and struggling to make sense of the fragmentary clippings, documents, and photographs the film’s characters left behind.

This is Mendonça’s first film to take place almost entirely in the past, and its loving recreation of a bygone world suggests a fantasy of making that archive whole. At the end of the film one of the researchers, an assiduous young woman, travels to Recife to meet with Fernando—now a doctor at a blood bank, played by Moura sporting a buzzcut. Considering the aliveness of Armando’s milieu—the beautiful, weathered faces, the movie posters, the heat and the sweat—it’s agonizing that, like Elizabeth Texeira’s children, Fernando doesn’t have much to say about his dad. Time did its thing.