On March 15th, one of the most important film awards ceremonies, the Oscars, will take place, and despite its well-known injustices, The Secret Agent is among the nominees for best international film.
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the film, like his other cinematic productions, presents a powerful critique that runs throughout and around which the director chooses to build his narrative. In *Neighboring Sounds *, his 2012 film, which narrates the arrival of a private militia and its impact on the residents of a middle-class street in the southern zone of Recife, Mendonça Filho criticizes the survival of the patriarchy, still holding the private monopoly on violence and the power to segregate social groups according to proximity to the pater familias , played by the phenomenal Waldemar José Solha. In *Aquarius*, from 2015 , Sônia Braga plays Clara, a resident of a building on the Boa Viagem beach who fights against the harassment of a construction company that wants to buy the building where she lives. Here, the critique is directed at the monster of real estate speculation that devours urban land and the homes of thousands of families, whose removals make way for impersonal skyscrapers and their gourmet balconies . Bacurau , from 2019 , creates a dystopian future in which residents of a small town in the Pernambuco backlands organize a resistance movement against foreigners who settle there with the aim of practicing sport hunting with the region's natives. The reference to Palmares and Canudos could not be more explicit.
In The Secret Agent, Kleber and his team were no less surgical in defining a social problem dissected throughout the film, which tells the story of a university professor, Marcelo, who decides to return to Recife, his hometown, in 1977. This is the moment of the "false" political opening of the Geisel government which, secretly, continues with cruel persecutions and tortures. Played by Wagner Moura, hunted by the henchmen of a businessman colluding with the military regime, the professor stays at the home of Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria) and her Siamese twin cats, Liza and Elis.
The other guests at Dona Sebastiana's, also political refugees from dictatorships scattered around the world, have no names. Or, like Teresa Victoria, who, along with her partner, fled the Angolan Civil War and adopted another name. Marcelo is a pseudonym for Armando and, like everyone gathered there in a circle on a Carnival night, is a "secret agent," just another person persecuted and tortured by one of the many repressive states of the 70s.
We can consider that he was also a "secret agent"—that is, someone who acts in secret, without anyone knowing his real name—a corpse that, at a certain point in the film, appears being thrown somewhere on Boa Viagem beach. Snatched by a shark, the man's leg ends up, elasmobranch and all, in the city morgue, from which it eventually escapes. As the tension in the film increases, in the same rhythm as the violence of the regime, this escaped leg, said to be hairy, begins to attack people, especially "transgressors of good society," such as prostitutes, transvestites, and homosexuals.
For those unfamiliar with Recife's culture, the appearance of the leg kicking in all directions seems to derail the film. I myself, imagining it might be some kind of "inside joke," couldn't immediately understand the meaning of the Hairy Leg. Later, after researching, I discovered it's a myth from Recife's folklore, enshrined in Chico Science's song, "Monólogo ao pé do ouvido / Banditismo por uma questão de classe" (Monologue in the Ear / Banditry as a Class Issue), from 1994: "Galeguinho do Coque wasn't afraid, wasn't / Wasn't afraid of the hairy leg / Biu with the green eyes had sex, did / Had sex with his pliers."
The first appearance of Perna Cabeluda (Hairy Leg) was recorded in the Diário de Pernambuco newspaper on December 11, 1975. Some sources say that, in reality, it was a strategy by journalist Raimundo Carrero to fill the newspaper's empty pages due to censorship imposed by the regime. Thus, when a colleague arrived at the Diário 's newsroom breathless after seeing a hairy leg detached from its body under the bed where he slept with his wife, Carrero transformed the episode into one of the most celebrated urban legends in the history of the "Brazilian Venice" (a nickname for Pernambuco).
In the script developed over three years by Kleber Mendonça, the severed leg strikes precisely on Carnival night when Marcelo, the secret agent, was meeting with other agents in Dona Sebastiana's living room. It then becomes the object of comments and laughter among these anonymous figures from the dictatorships.
Hairy Leg is much more than folklore. Hairy Leg allows us to remember one of the hardest moments in our political history, in which urban legends, cornbread recipes, poems by Camões, blank pages and ingeniously incorrect calculations, such as the note published by the weekly Em Tempo in March 1978, which read "All wrong: 2 and 2 are 8", were not only used to fill newspaper pages but also to communicate something from the realm of the forbidden. Like her, other legs, arms and hands, which could not freely express themselves in the streets, nor openly fight for what they believed in, bravely resisted in the pages of Brazilian newspapers, conveying the message that, despite everything – and you, [1] Geisel – there was still reason to continue fighting.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[1] The song “Apesar de Você”, by Chico Buarque de Holanda, was initially released in 1970, during the Médici government, but was only released in 1978, during the Geisel government. The “você” in the original lyrics therefore does not refer to the second, but to the first.
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