Writer/Director Kleber Mendonça Filho & Best Actor Nominee Wagner Moura on Their Oscar-Nominated Thriller “The Secret Agent”
The Secret Agent’s four Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Actor for Wagner Moura, and Best Casting) may have surprised some Oscar prognosticators. But the film’s writer/director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil’s leading filmmaker, has been on the edge of Oscar attention for years, after his critically acclaimed features Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, Bacarau, and his personal documentary Pictures of Ghosts.
Boding well for the film’s success at the Oscars is that The Secret Agent follows Brazil’s strong Oscar showing last year when Walter Salles’ acclaimed drama I’m Still Here was named Best International Feature. If The Secret Agent wins that category, it will mark the first time in 37 years that a country has won it back-to-back. Denmark earned consecutive victories in 1987 and 1988.
The Secret Agent is set in Mendonça Filho’s hometown of Recife in 1977 during Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship. Moura, a film star in Brazil who is best known in the U.S. for Narcos, plays Armando, a research scientist and widowed father forced to change his identity while on the run from regime authorities for reasons he and the audience don’t quite understand. Mendonça Filho, a former film critic and renowned cinephile, boldly blends a 1970s Hollywood-style political thriller with his own personal memories, especially of the movies he saw growing up.
“I was nine years old in 1977 and [at that age] you are like a sponge observing things that make an impression … I remember colors and smells and the emotional punch of being introduced to the downtown area of Recife which at the time was very bustling, when all the movie palaces played a strong part in the area,” said Mendonça Filho in a Zoom interview.
“My mother went through a health crisis, which put a time stamp on the years 1977 and ’78. Because of that, my uncle Ronald took my brother and me to the cinema many times. In those months, we must have been 20 times. I remember films I saw and the films on posters I never got to see. Each cinema had its own way of presenting coming attractions, so all that was strong for me. All of this atmosphere is something that made me feel emotionally connected to this project, which I always wanted to make with Wagner. It was always going to be something set in the 1970s with Wagner Moura.”
The Secret Agent looks at life during the brutal military regime through a lens of personal and collective memory — two young women in the present are tasked with transcribing interviews that took place under the dictatorship — as it blends action with surreal comedy. Among the memorable scenes are those set in a Recife theater — the same 1950s-era cinema featured in Pictures of Ghosts — where Armando’s father-in-law works as a projectionist and where we see glimpses of The Omen and Jaws, the movie Armando’s young son is eager to see. There are also glimpses of movie posters such as Dona Flor and her Two Husbands starring Brazilian screen legend Sonia Braga, who also starred in Aquarius and Bacarau.
“I believe cinema puts a time stamp on our lives, like music does,” said Mendonça Filho. “In a period piece, I use these cultural time stamps. Hollywood had a strong reverberation around the world. Brazilian time stamps were telenovelas, musicals of that era. In the ‘70s, Jaws was a phenomenon in Brazil. Recife is a coastal city with a real shark problem, so combining the two is fascinating. It’s like bacon and eggs — how could I avoid using the shark element in the film? Cinema is part of Brazilian life. As a cinephile, it was important to use those references. The Omen was a big hit in Brazil; being a Catholic country, all those Catholic horrors [were popular]. Like music, films are period-specific but universal.”
One of the film’s visual metaphors is its most absurdist: the hairy leg, an appendage that haunts nighttime Recife. “The hairy leg is an urban legend in Recife in the ‘70s,” said Mendonça Filho. “The city was transgressive in terms of film, music, literature, theater, and had to deal with censorship at a time when you could find police waiting to take you for ‘a ride.’ [Residents] came up with the term “hairy leg,” which was code for the military police. [People would say] ‘the hairy leg attacked last night,’ which means police beat people up in the park, often in the gay community. It’s so absurd that it became a phenomenon in Recife, with cartoons in the paper and talk on a radio show. I always wanted to use it in a film, and this was the right film; it gave me the chance to work with stop-motion animation.”
Moura said he’s long admired and wanted to work with Mendonça Filho. The Secret Agent represents a true collaboration, he said.
“We met 20 years ago at the Cannes film festival. He was a critic covering it at the time, and I was there with a film, and we hit it off because we are from the same region, the northeast of the country. When I went back to Brazil, I watched his short films. Then in 2012, I saw Neighboring Sounds, his first feature, and I thought it was the greatest film I’d ever seen in my life. From then on, I was obsessed with working with him. From 2018 to 2022, Brazil was under a criminal fascist government. We were both vocal and suffered the consequences. The genesis of this film was how we can react as artists and citizens in Brazil? Armando is just trying to stick to his values when everything around him is saying the opposite.”
Mendonça Filho noted that The Secret Agent has resonated with audiences in Brazil and around the world because of its relevance to the precarious state of democracy in many places, including the United States.
“In Brazil, we made this because we were under [former president Jair] Bolsonaro. Now we are in a democratic moment for the first time, and Bolsonaro is going to jail,” he said. “This film is about a man who sticks to his values. In Spain, there’s been a strong reaction. Franco died of old age, not in prison, and Spain never dealt with what happened. Same in Chile with Pinochet. We are in a positive moment for democracy, which Brazil does not take for granted anymore because we know how fragile it can be. We treated the coup [plot in 2022-2023] differently than America did because we know how bad it can get. Democracy is not a given; you have to fight for it.”
The Secret Agent is in select theaters now.
Featured image: L-r: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Wagner Moura. Courtesy Neon.
