Evgenia Alexandrova, the Russian-born, Paris-based cinematographer, has brought her exquisite eye for detail and movement to documentaries and narrative films alike, including the Noémie Merlant-directed, Céline Sciamma-co-written horror comedy “The Balconettes,” and Sonia Benslama’s acclaimed documentary “Machtat,” and, now, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” Brazil’s choice to represent the country for this year’s Best International Film at the Academy Awards.
That selection in no small part thanks to the visual flare of Alexandrova’s work behind the camera, and that visual flare comes in no small part of how intuitively Alexandrova understood Mendonça Filho’s script.
Mostly set in 1977, the historical political epic uses noir and thriller tropes to create a never-ending sense of dread as it follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a disgraced academic whose life has been turned upside down when he finds himself targeted by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Arriving in Recife during carnival, Armando takes a job at the city’s social registration archive while hiding out under the assumed name of Marcelo.
When a hit is put on his life, Armando races against time to find proof of his late mother’s existence before hopefully fleeing the country with his young son, Fernando. Like “Picture of Ghosts,” Mendonça Filho’s love letter to the cinemas and movie houses of his childhood, he meticulously recreates 1970s Recife with a loving tactility in “The Secret Agent.”
Mendonça Filho entrusted Alexandrova to bring this tactile world to life on the strength of her previous Brazilian-shot film, Nara Normande and Tião’s 2023 coming-of-age drama “Heartless.” Although a non-Brazilian, Alexandrova steers clear of bringing an exoticized gaze to her work. “I rarely think in terms of images. I usually think in terms of the sense of what I’m doing,” she told IndieWire at the Virginia Film Festival in October, where she received the festival’s Craft Award for Cinematography. “So that’s probably why I’m not that much into aesthetics, but more into what the story is about, and what it means for the character as a human being, no matter where they are.”
Indeed, she brings a documentary sensibility to the work of fiction. When shooting a documentary, Alexandrova said that she’s facing reality, which is “a good reminder for fiction, because we tend to make a shot list, plan our light, put dolly tracks, and then reality is happening, which might be different from what you imagined, and might be even more beautiful and more interesting.”
It helps when working with a director who really wants to use interesting cinematic tools to tell the story. Alexandrova appreciated that Mendonça Filho is never pretending that the camera doesn’t exist as a core part of the storytelling. Along with the film’s warm color palette of the film, period-specific techniques like zooms and split-diopter shots are used to place the viewer directly into the psyche of a character at any given moment. Reading Kleber’s script for the first time, it resonated with me, coming from the USSR. So I could really feel what the script was about,” the cinematographer said.
In one of the film’s most out-there moments, a character reads a newspaper article about the severed foot, which allegedly attacked a popular cruising spot at night – the corrupt police administration’s absurd cover-up for the state-inflicted violence during carnival. The scene is shot in one fluid movement, following the foot as it inflicts mayhem through the darkened park. Filmed with the heightened sense of light and dark of a comic book, Alexandrova calls it one of the most metaphoric scenes of the film.
Still, the collaborators wanted to create a vivid sense of the period, down to getting the color of the cement on the sidewalks the exact shade it would have been in 1977. Although Mendonça Filho had used Panavision C series on his previous films, Alexandrova suggested they use the Panavision B series, which actually come from the era. Alexandrova felt they would be the right choice because of how “they really react to highlights and when very dark colors and very bright colors meet, aberrations appear, and also how they can distort,” she said.
Speaking about the recent trend of very flat cinematography where “nothing is overexposed, nothing is underexposed,” Alexandrova said she’s “not constraining the dynamic of the lights into just a very small palette.” The director of photography rather enjoys it when light just flashes up, instead. “I like deep shadows as well, and I think it brings character to the image,” Alexandrova said.
This sense of visual jazz can be felt in scenes where handheld shooting was embraced, as in the film’s flashback scene in which Armando and his wife Fátima find themselves at odds with rising fascism during a fateful dinner. Alexandrova chose to switch to handheld because of the energy brought to the set by actress Alice Carvalho, who plays Fátima, Armando’s late wife, who was also a scholar and political radical. “I had a stronger connection with her when I was handheld,” Alexandrova said. “She’s a woman and I’m a woman, and I kind of felt what she was messaging, through her words, because she was not considered at this dinner. She was treated as a secretary when she was actually an academic. And it felt like, yeah, ‘You go, girl.’ I kind of felt very much with her at this moment.”
Alexandrova felt this sense of intuitiveness throughout the filming of “The Secret Agent.” Although most of Moura’s scenes were filmed with a mounted camera, his final phone call to Elza was filmed with a handheld camera. In the tense scene, Armando narrowly escapes from a hitman, aided by the labyrinthine halls of the records office. The oppressive sunlight shines through its windows, leaving nowhere to hide in the shadows. Manic, flute-laden music fills the soundtrack. The camera follows Armando as he coolly makes his way down the hall, then rests on his concerned face as he insists to political resistance leader Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), “My time in Recife is over.” On the choice to film the emotional scene handheld, Alexandrova recalled, “Both of us really loved it because it creates a connection between the intention and the camera.”
Alexandrova also switched to handheld for some of the film’s strikingly sterile contemporary scenes, where students learn about Armando’s fate while typing out transcripts for a university archive. Although Mendonça Filho and Alexandrova had discussed such radical change-ups such as shooting these scenes with an iPhone, they ultimately opted for shooting them with the same equipment, while treating the colors differently on set and in post. The result adds a distancing effect, removing the warmth and vitality of the past from the cold and clinical reality of the present. “It’s so interesting,” said Alexandrova, “this comparison of how people really were and how we remember them.”
Neon opens “The Secret Agent” on Wednesday, November 26.