There is a lot to talk about, best director at the festival — which also awarded the actor, protagonist of the story. I’ll talk a little.
The film does not focus on a central narrative, although it exists, but is surrounded by other situations and twists, one of which is remarkable, which accompanies us like a kind of B-movie within a film. It is the story, in a fantastic and popular atmosphere, of Perna Cabeluda. That’s right, a leg that appears in the belly of a shark, is surrounded by mystery, stolen from the Forensic Medical Institute and transformed by what people said and the press into a being with its own life, which makes violent appearances at night in the city.
The Hairy Leg is one of those myths inflated by old sensationalist popular newspapers. In 1975, for example, the time of the film (which takes place in 1977) in São Paulo, it attracted readers with the story of the Baby Devil.
The daily newspaper, in fact, plays a prominent role in “”, not only because of Perna Cabeluda, but because it serves as a news record, precarious as it may be, of events directly linked to the plot.
Of the director’s fiction films, this seems to be the one that comes closest, so to speak, to one in Recife. The film, by the way, was released after “Retratos Fantasmas”, a memorialistic incursion into the paths of the presence of the man in the life of his hometown.
In “The Secret Agent” we have an expressive tour of the human, social and urban landscape of Recife at the end of the 1970s — an essential aspect of the film. Mendonça does not wear dentures or apply weight-loss injections to his characters. He treats them with a Fellinian realism, in which affection, repulsion, humor and life are combined.
Regarding relations with the dictatorship, the story is more oblique, as it does not deal directly with the military core, highlighting the capillarity of police discretion, the environment of tension and the business, private and state side of the regime — we were under Geisel, who appears there, in the official portrait, hanging on the wall.
It initially caught our attention with its great . I like them both, more so than “Bacurau”, which ended up being affected by the polarizing climate of the time, encouraged by the fact that the director and his star Sonia Braga used public occasions provided by the film to publicize “Lula livre”, led by the PT.
Attacked by anti-PT supporters and defended by the left, “Bacurau” was predominantly analyzed in the context of cinemanovista issues and resistance to American imperialism. For some it revived the theme, for others it revived it in an anachronistic way. I don’t see it that way. I would say that his dystopian fable of arbitrary violence evokes marginal cinema and is closer to what we see in police operations in Rio’s favelas or situations in Gaza than to old imperialism.
In any case, I notice (and like) something that seems lame to me in Kleber Mendonça’s films. Perhaps that’s why he was amazed by the expressive sequence of a long walk by the character Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) through the city streets.
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