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Beyond portraying class and gender relations in contemporary society, Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015) offers a sensitive and powerful radiography of biopower in action. Set in São Paulo, Brazil, the feature film follows domestic worker Val (Regina Casé) and her daughter Jéssica (Camila Márdila) to reveal how discipline, the control of bodies, and regulated affection shape an everyday biopolitics that permeates the walls of an upper-middle-class household.
I will demonstrate how Muylaert’s film functions as a cinematic critique of the government of life – what Michel Foucault termed biopolitics – revealing the mechanisms and the power relations that determine who serves who, and who belongs where, and who is entitled to enjoyment, scene by scene.
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The empty pool
The empty pool, reflecting the blue sky, is the metaphor of the disciplinary power that organises the body. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, describes how modern power disciplines the body through delimited spaces and constant surveillance. Here, the still water is the suspended promise: who can bathe and who merely cleans the edge? This emptiness heralds exclusion. The popular body (Val) is governed by prohibition.
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The kitchen as the biopolitics of affection
The kitchen is the territory of cordial servitude. Val’s smile is, as Foucault shows in The History of Sexuality, a microphysics of power that regulates gestures and emotions. In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe warns of how contemporary power affects not only who lives, but also who is condemned to survive precariously. Val’s smile is thus the docile face of a structural violence: living is permitted, but not freely.
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The forbidden guest room and Jéssica’s body
When Jéssica occupies the guest room, she transgresses the spatial discipline of the house. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault reveals how biopower demarcates boundaries defining who belongs and who is a guest. Giorgio Agamben, in Homo Sacer (1995), shows how power creates “zones of exception” where bodies can be expelled or included at will. Jéssica is the body of exception that forces power to reveal itself: the body that does not fit the disciplinary regime.
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Breakfast as the tribunal
The lavish breakfast table is a tribunal: whoever sits there submits to the gaze of power. Foucault reminds us that modern power regulates even the most banal gestures — the way of sitting, speaking, chewing. Mbembe ascertains that this banquet is also a field of symbolic exclusion: apparent hospitality, in fact, reinforces the division between those who belong and those who serve.
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Jéssica occupies the pool
When Jéssica plunges into the pool, subversion overflows: the subaltern body bathes, dissolving boundaries. Agamben calls this an inverted “state of exception”: the excluded body invades the forbidden territory. Mbembe emphasises that water is a contested territory: in it, the body of the swimmer can claim equality, confronting the power that subjugated it.
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Jéssica’s ejection from the guest room
Jéssica’s expulsion is the naked face of power. Agamben reminds us that power is exercised not only through discipline, but through the sovereign decision of who lives inside and who lives outside. The mistress here wields necropolitics: the power to kill symbolically, expelling the other to the space of servitude.
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The reunion of Val and Jéssica
On the staircase, Val and Jéssica embody the colonial wound. Disciplined affect is the mark of biopolitics: Foucault describes how power regulates not only bodies, but also it affects them. When Val hesitates, it is the power that inhabits her – the fear of disobedience. Mbembe points out that refusing servitude is a rejection of necropolitics: a step towards full citizenship.
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Fired over the phone
During the phone call in which she receives the news of her dismissal, Val raises her voice and challenges domestic sovereignty. Foucault calls this a “counter-conduct” – the gesture of resistance that disorganises power. Agamben sees a claim to dignity here: the body that refuses to be “bare life”, that becomes a subject.
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Val at the edge of the pool
The final scene celebrates regained dignity. Val, upright, contemplates the territory once forbidden. Mbembe establishes the body that refuses necropolitics emerges here – the body that demands to live without subordination. It is the woman who no longer accepts being governed, who reinvents the very biopolitics of existence.
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Anna Muylaert, in The Second Mother, crafts a film where each scene is a visual essay on biopolitics: It established who gets to live, who gets to serve, who gets to enjoy life. A film that, scene by scene, reveals a deep Brazil, where the body of the other is regulated by the gaze, by discipline, by exclusion. But also a film where the body can rise, tear open the margins and hesitantly declare: I exist.
