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 to TheWrap’s studio at the Toronto International Film Festival, he explained that the characterization of 1977 as a time of mischief was in part accurate to how he remembered that year (he was 9 at the time), but it was also a way of avoiding an explicit mention of the military dictatorship that ran the country at the time.
“I remember it as a time of mischief, although the Portuguese word I used implies something a little stronger than that,” he said. “But I also wanted to avoid saying anything about the dictatorship at the beginning of the movie. If you look at films about that era, they all talk about the dictatorship. I wanted to grossly understate how serious all of that was.”
But that’s not to say that “The Secret Agent,” which premiered in Cannes, where Moura won the best actor award, doesn’t deal with the political climate of the era. For one thing, Moura’s character is on the run from mysterious government forces; for another, even the film’s most fantastical sequences, the discovery of the severed leg and a fantasy sequence in which the leg comes to life and runs rampant through a park where gay men are having sex, are call-outs to a local legend that is less about horror than it is about politics.
“The hairy leg was an urban legend in Recife,” said Mendonça Filho, who grew up in that town, still lives there and has made most of his movies there. “It was invented by a journalist as a safe way to write about how the dictatorship was attacking gays and other people. You can’t write about what the dictatorship was doing, but you could write about attacks by this legendary hairy leg and people would know what you’re talking about.”
Moura said he jumped at the chance to work with Mendonça Filho, who he’s known for many years. As a character who hides his true identity much of the time, he played with the nature of truth, which he finds increasingly under attack. “We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t know what’s true anymore, and that helps repressive governments,” he said. “It’s a dangerous way to be.”
But Mendonça Filho added that it was important to not keep “The Secret Agent” rooted in the past. About an hour into the film, he begins to introduce flash-forwards featuring the character of two young female researchers who are looking into the events of 1977 and are listening to tapes made of Moura’s character and others.
“That’s not bringing the story into the present, it’s bringing it into the future,” he said. “I wanted to show how the understanding of an event can change completely depending on when you experience it or learn about it.”
He nodded at the iPhone sitting on the table in front of him. “This conversation is being recorded,” he said. “It will mean one thing if we listen to it today – but if somebody listens to it 50 years from now, it will mean something very different.”
