Flashback to the ’70s when DMVs and recordkeeping offices were miserable places of endless waiting.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: The latest chapter in the South American Totalitarian History Cinematic Universe is here! In recent times native filmmakers beyond the Panama Canal have been yearning to tell stories of their homelands’ darker times now that decades have passed and some of the worst regimes have since been deposed or overruled. We’ve had Prime Video’s docudrama Argentina 1984, the 2020 Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy about Brazil in the 2000s, and last year’s I’m Still Here, which traveled thirty years back in the same country under its perpetuated terrible circumstances. And those are just three recent Academy Award nominees I’ve seen (and a win, in the latter’s case), to say nothing of how many others have flown under my radar or haven’t reached North American audiences.

The Gist: Set several years after I’m Still Here, writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is a political thriller in which the rather magnetic Wagner Moura (Alex Garland’s Civil War, Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith) is a former professor who’s introduced to us as Marcelo, co-creator of a potentially groundbreaking pet project that’s rubbed a relevant government minister the wrong way and has brought upon him the wrathful attention of the unnamed Powers That Be. The film’s complex novelistic structure intertwines multiple timelines and subplots: Marcelo’s move to a sympathetic group home, the fate of his career, his small town’s fat-cat law enforcement, his pursuers in the shadows, and present-day flash-forward interludes woven into the narrative so quietly that I chuckled at the sight of what I thought were anachronistic earbuds until I caught on.

The familiar faces: Maria Fernanda Cândido (the third and final Fantastic Beasts) is Our Hero’s new amour at the group home. Gabriel Leone (a leading driver for Adam Driver’s team in Michael Mann’s Ferrari) is a stone-cold contract killer technically on the government’s payroll. Other costars are possibly major names in the Brazilian entertainment industry, for all I know.

One surprise amongst the ensemble whose first language isn’t Portuguese: character actor Udo Kier — whose storied career ranged from Warhol’s Factory to Ace Venture to playing Hitler in Prime’s Hunters and more more more, and who just passed away in November — has at least two scenes as a German tailor in the neighborhood.

The Impressions: Over 2½ hours long, The Secret Agent covers enough fertile grounds for an entire TV series’ worth of storylines that would beg for further exploration of that tumultuous time and its unnerving reverberations. Moura is compelling as a normally peaceful, unarmed man who’s laser-focused on a new mission after his previous passion has been denied. His search for hard truths in a time of suppression may be relatable to modern audiences who, like Marcelo, yearn to fill the chasm-like gaps in their family history, though usually we don’t have to worry about such quests getting us killed.

Mendonça Filho grounds the proceedings firmly in the decade’s squalor, its limited tech (rotary phones! card catalogs! tape recorders!), and its pop-culture touchstones. One key location, a movie theater run by Marcelo’s grandfather-in-law, is a fun excuse to run clips from The Omen and a certain international box-office smash that lends itself to Agent‘s recurring shark motif — not merely as silver-screen killers that distract us from real-life ones, but as symbolic swallowers of everything in their path, daunting any onlookers not brave enough to dare see for themselves what such insatiable maws might contain. The director’s use of such specific films stops short of turning into a Movie About The Magic of Movies (though that might explain its big wins at last weekend’s Golden Globes), but their presence in the collective consciousness-at-large helps explain one extremely jarring interlude — a wildly surreal sequence that reads like a satire of tabloid crap two years before Weekly World News‘ launch, but which some viewers have apparently been treating as if Agent does indeed veer into supernatural butchery.

Eventually everything ties together, though some characters are more satisfied with their closure than others. The Secret Agent inevitably pulls us to seat’s edge with a violent climax (and not between the combatants we’d anticipate), a subsequent gut-punch from a single photo that leaves us reeling, and a coda reflecting upon the traumas of generations who might or might not remember the most important lessons or what their own ancestors once meant to them. Our reckoning with the past can depend on how much we remember and how much we want to remember.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Secret Agent end credits, but they lead off with a dedication in Portuguese that isn’t translated and contains the number 1,300. I assume its intent is meaningful and/or heartfelt.

[MCC housekeeping note: please pardon our virtual dust while I’m tinkering with our movie-review format…]