Near the end of 1975, reports began to appear in the Diário de Pernambuco of a ghostly, disembodied and entirely sentient ‘hairy leg’. It was first spotted in the neighbourhood of Tiúma, on a street known for paranormal activity, as a projection on the walls of one of the houses (number thirteen, if you can believe it). A little boy caught sight of the perna cabeluda and ran away screaming, attracting priests and pastors and eventually police. Sightings soon spread to other houses, the poltergeist like a little pop-up cinema. Two months later, a local man reported finding his wife in bed with the hairy leg, sharing a post-coital cigarette. He claimed that it hopped from the sheets and attacked him. After this, reports multiplied – horror stories were relayed on the radio, in bars and business meetings. It was all the coastal city of Recife could talk about. The hairy leg soon became responsible for beatings, tortures, disappearances, mutilations, murders and all sorts of other crimes – crimes almost too fantastic to be believed.

The Secret Agent opens in 1977, during what the film calls ‘a period of great mischief’. In an interview with the New Yorker, its director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, explained that referring to the period of Brazil’s military dictatorship this way was itself a bit of mischief – a satirical version of those pre-credit scrolls you see in Casablanca or Star Wars. ‘It’s a wonderful word, quite old-fashioned’, he says, of the Portuguese pirraça. ‘It usually means someone who’s teasing someone else, in a mean-spirited way. Someone who has the power to play a prank on you. And that prank might go overboard.’ In his film, the perna cabeluda washes up in the stomach of a dead shark. The local police chief is alerted and tells one of his henchmen to throw the damned thing back into the ocean. The following night, in a B-Movie-style interlude, we watch the hairy leg emerge from the water, like an evil zombie pogo, and terrorize beachgoers.

It’s an artistic flourish that links local myth with cinema, and the global phenomenon of Jaws more specifically – a film still packing theatres in Recife a year after its release. Fernando, a nine-year-old boy – the same age as Mendonça was in 1977 – dreams of seeing Jaws, but his father, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), won’t let him. He’s too young; the poster alone gives him nightmares. Fernando lives with his grandfather, Alexandre, who works as a projectionist at the Cinema São Luiz. His mother is dead and Marcelo is on the run. We only find out why near the end of the film, when he is interviewed by Elza, a resistance leader, in the projection booth of Alexandre’s cinema.

The film opens with Marcelo making his way to Recife in a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle, pulling into a remote petrol station where he finds a rotting corpse, getting shaken down by police – completely uninterested in the body – and then heading on his way; he arrives at a safehouse run by a charming, decrepit anarcho-communist with a two-headed cat, meets other dissidents and fugitives, some fleeing the Angolan Civil War; we learn his real name is Armando Solimões, that he’s a blacklisted former professor and that there’s a price on his head – and then we cut to the present, where a university student named Flavia is listening to the tapes of his testimony.

The Cinema São Luiz featured prominently in Mendonça’s previous film, Pictures of Ghosts (2023), a memoir-essay about his hometown and its cinemas. ‘I found the heart for The Secret Agent making Pictures of Ghosts’, he says, ‘the power of things that survive and are kept in archives. Because the archive is somebody’s proof of life. When you hear a voice recorded in 1977, that person was alive in ’77 . . . Probably the strongest feeling of time travel that I have ever felt is making films and working with archives.’

Thanks to the resistance network, Marcelo gets a job at Recife’s identity card office, where he spends most of his time looking for information about his mother, about whom he knows very little. Thus was a time when people went missing and were never found. A few years earlier, west of Pernambuco on the banks of the Araguaia River, a group of a hundred-odd communist guerillas took a stand against the Brazilian Army; at least sixty were tortured and murdered. Due to a 1979 Amnesty Law passed by the junta, no former military officer has ever been convicted in a criminal case, and it took until 2008, when Carlos Brilhante Ustra was declared a torturer by a civil court in São Paulo, for any of their crimes to be officially recognized. (He died a free man at 83.) It wasn’t until 2012 that then-President Dilma Rousseff established the Comissão Nacional da Verdade to investigate human rights violations during the years of the dictatorship. When Dilma was impeached in 2016, Jair Bolsonaro made a point of praising Ustra before casting his vote, calling him ‘the dread of Dilma Rousseff’.

Dilma herself was captured and tortured during those years. In 2011 a photograph of her was discovered in the São Paulo archives, taken in November 1970 when she was a member of the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares. She’d endured months in prison and weeks of torture and now found herself before a military court. In the photo, she sits slouched and bored, while two military generals stand over her, covering their faces as if in shame – as if the future could somehow see them. ‘Torture is a complex thing’, she told Brasil de Fato in 2020. ‘I think that everyone who went through prison will always bear that mark. I don’t like to watch movies where there is torture, for example. It’s not that I don’t like them. I just don’t watch them. I don’t want to watch that.’

In this regard, Mendonça’s carnivalesque crime-thriller is ideal viewing: the director said he wanted to ‘grossly underplay, almost in a poetic way’ the cruelty of the dictatorship. But there are still glimpses of horror. One of the film’s more striking interludes sees Marcelo picked up by the corrupt police chief Euclides and his goons. We want to show you something, Euclides says. Marcelo obliges, and they walk him to a nearby tailor to meet Hans (Udo Kier, in his final role), a supposed Nazi and regular victim of Euclides’s harassment. Show him your scars, he says, and like Marcelo, Hans obliges. He lifts his shirt and Euclides almost moans with excitement.

Bolsonaro was fond of lifting his shirt for the press to show off his stab wounds, often during his many stays in hospital for Covid-19. It was a kind of macho peacocking, the same thing that here excites Euclides, who thinks of Hans as a fellow soldier who fought for his country and earned his stripes. Mendonça has said that Hans was inspired by a Romanian refugee, his father’s friend and tailor, and the city’s Jewish heritage (Recife was the site of Brazil’s first organized Jewish community in the seventeeth century). At the scene’s conclusion, Hans is revealed to be a Holocaust survivor, forced to accept the title of Nazi to remain in Euclides’s good graces. His character speaks to the peculiar nature of identity under fascism. In 1977 Brazil, Hans lives under an assumed identity, as does Marcelo, as indeed did Josef Mengele, who escaped like so many Nazis to South America through the ratlines (he would drown in São Paulo two years later).

Mendonça has said that he saw in the Bolsonaro regime a mimicry of Nazism, in its rhetoric and ideology, but also ‘in a fetishist way’. (On the subject of archives: Bolsonaro, after a visit to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, said that the crimes of the Holocaust could be ‘forgiven, but not forgotten’; yet of his country’s own buried past he has said, ‘Only a dog looks for bones’.) A few weeks after Dilma was impeached in 2016, Mendonça’s film Aquarius was shown at Cannes; on the red carpet the director held signs expressing support for Dilma and stating that Brazil was no longer a democracy. When he emerged from the theatre two hours later, he was met by a ‘firestorm’; he received death threats and his films, subject to the whims of their nation’s government, were denied entry into the Oscar race. This year, Mendonça is nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which should he win will be collected by his wife.

One form of torture that became infamous during the dictatorship was the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, where the victim is tied to a pole that runs along the inside of their elbows and backs of their knees. It was originally called the ‘Boger swing’, named after the Nazi who popularized the technique at Auschwitz. The prominence of bright orange payphones in the film may obliquely gesture to another form of torture, where students were hung up in public, soaked and then electrocuted with wind-up phones – typically on their genitals. And perhaps the yellow Beetle that brings us into the film gestures to the famous photograph of Carlos Marighella, another guerilla dissident, slumped dead in the same car after being assassinated by police. (Moura made his directorial debut with Marighella in 2019; the Bolsonaro government barred the film from distribution in Brazil.) Reality exists in all these images, subtle though they may be, because it exists in their referents – that is, in the archive, the ‘proof of life’.

When the military archives were opened for legal purposes in 1979, a group of lawyers set about smuggling the papers to a room filled with rented photocopiers, eventually publishing Brasil: Nunca Mais (1985), which details 1,843 cases of torture. History exists in such miracles. One former member of the police testified in 2012 that he was responsible for disposing of at least ten bodies during the dictatorship, claiming he took the corpses to a sugar-cane plantation and burnt them in the distillery furnace – yet without proof, his words are as good as smoke. The Secret Agent was born from the archive, from the material history available to Mendonça during his research. What would the film be without it? Stories of the perna cabeluda emerged at a time when government censors patrolled the printing presses, with some newspapers reduced to publishing poetry or cake recipes on their front pages. These stories started as a joke, of course, a bit of mischief, but the perna cabeluda soon became a metonym for unacknowledged state violence – a way of speaking the unsaid.

Mendonça’s mother was a historian. He recalls fondly her bringing home tapes of interviews, listening to so many strange voices. ‘She wasn’t a filmmaker, but her interviews were very much like films.’ After her death, the tapes took on a new dimension – where the only voice that mattered was that of a love lost. At the end of The Secret Agent, Flavia, the student, meets with Fernando, now an adult, to talk about his father, whose voice she has been listening to for so many days, weeks, months. What’s shocking is that Fernando says he hardly remembers him. He thinks back to that time, the mischief of 1977, and has almost no memory of his father. But he does remember Jaws.

Read on: Robert Schwarz, ‘Neo-Backwardness in Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, NLR 123.