How 'The Secret Agent' Used Urban Legends to Hide Its Political Points

How do you make a movie about politics without making it appear as if you're making a movie about politics? If you're Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, you do it with a couple of elements of misdirection right from the start. His new film, "The Secret Agent," which stars Wagner Moura as a man in 1977 Brazil who returns to his hometown of Recife to hide from hitmen in the chaos of carnival, does that with a title card that calls that era "a time of great mischief," and by an opening scene in which fishermen find a human leg in the belly of a shark. When Mendonça Filho came . . .