The Secret Lives of My Three Men
(Brazil, 75 min.)
Dir. Letícia Simões
Programme: International Spectrum Competition (International premiere)
History may be written by the victors, but it is interpreted by the survivors. There’s a crucial personal element that is missing from official stories, one that provides a more extensive version of the truth. In The Secret Lives of My Three Men, director Letícia Simões probes her own family’s past as a means to investigate Brazil’s violent history and how that has shaped the country and its people. This hybrid documentary fuses the personal with the political in a dynamic virtuoso blend of poetry, theatre, and fundamentally cinematic components.
Through the use of actors, Simões recreates the personal histories of the men in her family. She summons their ghosts in a fable-like reality-based fantasy: her grandfather, Arnaud; her father, Fernando; and her godfather, Sebastião. Each man’s life story fills in vital parts of the totality that is present day Brazil.
These are intricate beings, each containing multitudes. As an adolescent, Arnaud became involved with a group of vigilantes fighting colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century in the northern part of the country. On the surface, Fernando was a devoted family man, but he was also a distracted bohemian and covert informant for the military dictatorship of the 1960s to 1980s, known as the Fifth Brazilian Republic.
Such contradictions don’t tend to make sense but in an allegory such as this one, there is a greater symbolic function. Fernando’s best friend, Sebastião, was a gay photographer and descendent of African slaves who lost the love of his life in a vicious homophobic attack. Sebastião’s artistic output was prolific, but apparently disorganized, creating a dilemma for Simões when he left her boxes of unlabelled images as an inheritance.
Through the filmmaker’s use of archival materials in collaboration with Sebastião’s photos, she is able to fill in the various ways that the country was shaped by diverse movements. Simões’ personal voice over explains everything from the ways the Indigenous communities fought against colonial oppressors to the manner in which the colonialists changed the nature of the country by bringing in African slaves. But she also speaks of dreams and hopes and wishes. Add to this the touches of animation that she mixes in and she creates profound poetic through her particular blend of seemingly disparate elements.
Simões employs actors as a means of bringing the stories behind these photos to life. It’s a self-conscious style in which she interacts with them. She highlights her own personal stake by appearing here, underscoring the fact that she is not afraid to showcase her vulnerability. It’s also a means to centre her creativity in this process: how she delights in her imagination by indulging in poetic licence and being playful. She relates how Arnaud was so masculine that she likened his strength to the kind embodied by women and has the actor portraying him adorn himself in fancy gowns. These are beautiful fantastical moments that are in stark contrast to the images of the impoverished vigilantes she intersperses in his segment.
But Simões not only interacts with her performers, sometimes directing them and responding to others, but she interrogates them. These scenes are quite gripping. It’s easy to get swallowed up in the drama that unfolds. At one point, she begs her father, Fernando, to be more open about his work as an informant. He deflects her pleas, playing guitar as he pompously lists his accomplishments, like being the first person in the family to go to university. Her absolute exasperation with him reverberates through the film.
Sebastião’s story is a complex amalgam that includes both a fanciful, in-depth discussion with this unknown but doting godfather and a recreation of his life as a gay man in Brazil. He talks of falling in love and escaping macho culture with his beloved into the sanctity of safe queer spaces. In a heartbreaking moment, the filmmaker uses animation as he relates the attack that resulted in his boyfriend’s death. By using animation in this sequence, Simões achieves a level of emotional connection with this person – or character – that deeply underscores the horrific nature of the attack and the devastating emotional wound that Sebastião suffered for the rest of his life. His only solace was his work as a photographer.
Having begun with Sebastião’s mysterious photos, which offer little context and are populated by nameless people, Simões reclaims their place in historical records in her act of recreation. Photography provides concrete proof of the existence of these individuals, a fact that she underscores by using the pictures as building blocks in her deeper investigation of the lives of these three men who are connected to her. The different film stocks of both the photography and the archival footage give the film a textured look that highlights their significance as historical artifacts. It also privileges Simões’ own act of creation, which blends so harmoniously with the theatrical nature of the rest of the film.
The Secret Lives of My Three Men works so well because of the way Simões combines all these elements into a tale of a people that are fighters. This documentary is theatrical but also deeply rooted in cinematic tradition – it’s poetic on a variety of levels. The spoken words on the part of the actors, whether it’s dialogue or soliloquy combine with the various kinds of imagery through her flowing transitions. She summons ghosts in a narrative interrogation of actual footage and photographs. But the fiction is key here because of the distance in time. It enables her to create an immersive intellectual experience. In this way, the story of one family becomes the history of a country.
