In '70s Brazil, a woman strives to expose the truth behind her husband's
disappearance at government hands.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Walter Salles
Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Guilherme Silveira, Luiza Kosovski, Fernanda Montenegro
In the last few years we've received a crop of films from Argentina (Rojo;
A Common Crime;
Azor) and Chile (1976;
El Conde) addressing those South American nations' years under the rule of fascist
military dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century. Now Brazilian
filmmaker Walter Salles reopens and hopes to salve his own country's
wounds with I'm Still Here, adapted from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. In 1971,
Paiva's father Rubens, a former congressman turned civil engineer, was taken
from his home, never to be seen again.
The focus of Salles' film isn't on Rubens (for how could it be, given his
absence), but on his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and her
balancing act of trying to find out what happened to her husband while
protecting her five children. The opening scenes, in which Rubens (Selton Mello) is still present, paint a picture of a middle class family living a
perfectly content life in an enviable house a mere stone's throw away from
Rio's Copacabana beach. Eunice and Rubens are constantly throwing parties,
while kids scurry in and out through an always-open front door (Salles was
himself one of the neighbourhood children who spent time in the Paivas'
home) and teenagers dance to Tropicalia records (it's unlikely you'll hear a
funkier soundtrack in 2025).
But in the background Rubens is living a secret life, one his wife is aware
of but has decided not to address. Strangers appear at their door and pass
mysterious packages to Rubens, who often leaves the house after receiving
phone calls, claiming he has to go to his office. If her country wasn't
being ruled by a military junta, Eunice might suspect her husband of having
an affair. Whether Eunice knows of Rubens' involvement with the resistance
is left ambiguous, but Torres plays it in a manner that suggests she has
decided to ignore it and keep her head in the sand.
The truth of her country is made explicit for Eunice when a group of men
arrive and take Rubens away, claiming to require him to sign a deposition.
The following day Eunice and her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are bundled into a car, masks placed over their heads, and brought to a
military prison, where Eunice is questioned regarding her husband's
activities. After 12 days Eunice is released, her daughter having been sent
home a week earlier. Rubens however has disappeared, or rather "been
disappeared." Eunice sets out on a decades-long campaign to find out what
happened to him.
Salles' approach to this story shuns convention by focussing on the
personal rather than political effects of Rubens' disappearance. Eunice's
campaigning largely occurs offscreen, Salles instead honing in on how she
keeps her family together. Eunice and her older daughters quietly accept
that they will likely never see Rubens again, while they try to shelter the
younger children from the truth. Of course, children aren't that naive, and
there are some heartbreaking moments that illustrate the family's
realisation that they will have to live the rest of their life without their
father. The film's most emotionally wrenching scene sees Eunice take her
children to a food court, only to find herself surrounded and contrasted by
obliviously happy families. As her eyes scan the court, they lock with those
of her older daughters, all of these women trying not to break down in tears
for the sake of the little ones.
Torres has rightly received plaudits for her performance. With the details
of what's happening in her country largely left offscreen, Brazil's troubles
are mapped on Eunice's increasingly lined face, which remains rigid even
when she wants to collapse. Torres paints a portrait of a woman fighting
back against a system she knows she can't beat by doing her best to get on
with as normal a life as she can provide for her family. When a newspaper
sympathetic to the resistance runs a story on Rubens' disappearance and asks
Eunice and her family to pose for a portrait, Eunice insists that her family
are seen smiling in the picture. The fascists may have taken her husband,
but she refuses to give them her joy.
Aside from Torres, Salles has assembled a strikingly good ensemble. Torres'
own mother Fernanda Montenegro (star of Salles'
Central Station) appears as an aged Eunice in a 2014-set coda to deliver one final silent
act of resilience. The actors who play Eunice's children in various stages
of their lives are never less than convincing as siblings, and there's
something undeniably touching about seeing them appear in the epilogue, now
older than their mother was in the 1970s-set portion. The film's final act,
set in 1996 and 2014, celebrates Brazil's rejection of fascism, but given
what we know has occurred since, it's a bittersweet triumph. Eunice Paiva
passed away in 2018, leaving us to wonder what she would make of today's
world with its casual and open flirtation with the very sort of fascism that
devastated her family.
I'm Still Here is in UK/ROI
cinemas from February 21st.
