The Political Drama of “I’m Still Here” Is Moving but Airbrushed

The Current CinemaIn Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated film, Fernanda Torres plays a woman whose family is torn apart by Brazil’s military dictatorship.Courtesy Sony Pictures ClassicsIn 1970, six years into Brazil’s military dictatorship, Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing politician, returned to the country after years of self-imposed exile. Not long after setting up home in Rio de Janeiro with his wife and their five children, he was arrested, on January 20, 1971. His wife, Eunice, was also detained and interrogated, and she never saw her husband again: only much later was it confirmed that Rubens had been tortured and murdered not long after his arrest. In the years that followed, Eunice earned a law degree and became a human-rights advocate, working tirelessly to secure a measure of justice for her husband and thousands of others whose lives were destroyed by the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.The title of “I’m Still Here,” the director Walter Salles’s stirring new drama about the Paiva family, comes, like the movie itself, from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the youngest of Rubens and Eunice’s children. It can be read as either a defiant declaration or a bitter lament. (Eunice is played by Fernanda Torres, and her superbly controlled performance is both subtle and capacious enough to accommodate either possibility.) By the time the film winds to a close, decades after Rubens’s disappearance, the fact that Eunice is still here—that she has outlived the regime that tore her family apart—is a proud testament to her strength and resilience. But her endurance has also been one prolonged defeat; as Eunice herself says in the film’s closing passages, having to go on without Rubens, not knowing if he would ever return, condemned her and her family to “eternal psychological torture.”Salles’s movie, his first narrative feature since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” means to convey some sense of that torture. But it also dilutes the sting, folding the raw anguish of Eunice’s experience in a warm, gauzy blanket of humanist storytelling. A gentle glow suffuses the opening moments, set during an idyllic afternoon at the beach, and later seems to pervade each lovingly appointed room of Rubens and Eunice’s nearby home. Everything we see and hear exalts the Paivas as a model of infectious, unruly familial joy: good-natured sibling banter, spontaneous dance parties, generously overflowing meals, and a seemingly open invitation to friends, neighborhood kids, and even a stray dog, which, naturally, is adopted the moment it wanders inside. Salles himself knew the Paivas and visited their home as a child, a fact that, along with the vibrant, funky specificity of Carlos Conti’s production design, may account for the depth of feeling he brings to these spirited hangouts. The action, radiantly shot by the cinematographer Adrian Teijido, flows effortlessly between indoors and outdoors; the house’s proximity to the ocean is at once a matter-of-fact physical reality and an easy metaphor for the family’s ebullient sense of freedom.But it is Eunice, at once a steadying presence and a sharp observer, who seems most conscious of the growing threats to that freedom. The movie’s very first shot, beautiful yet full of foreboding, finds her swimming in the Atlantic, her peace momentarily disturbed by the roar of a military helicopter overhead. Later, as the Paivas pose for a photo with friends on the beach, Eunice’s smile wavers at the increasingly familiar sight of armed soldiers in vehicles tearing past. She says nothing; Rubens (Selton Mello), who keeps a close watch on the situation with friends and colleagues, seems initially unworried. Moment by moment, though, anxiety mounts. The Paivas send their eldest child, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), to London for the holidays, keeping her and her political-activist streak temporarily out of harm’s way. Not long after news breaks that a Swiss diplomat has been kidnapped by Brazilian left-wing guerrillas, armed men show up at the Paivas’ door and haul Rubens away for a “deposition.” We never see what happens to him; from this point onward, the camera remains all but glued to Eunice, trapped at home with her children. The men, terse, unsmiling, and unfailingly polite, keep them under siege for days.“I’m Still Here” is at its strongest in these inherently tense sequences, in part because Salles doesn’t sensationalize. His approach, during the initial shock of Rubens’s removal, is simply to drain away every prior trace of warmth and ebullience. The curtains are drawn, plunging the house into unnatural shadows; a terrible silence descends, broken only when Eunice offers the men food and asks if they know when her husband will return. The hush and the darkness only deepen when Eunice and her second-eldest daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are taken to a nearby facility for questioning; Eliana, we later learn, is released after a day, but Eunice is i

Jan 30, 2025 - 21:48
 5860
The Political Drama of “I’m Still Here” Is Moving but Airbrushed
In Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated film, Fernanda Torres plays a woman whose family is torn apart by Brazil’s military dictatorship.
A family on the beach.
Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

In 1970, six years into Brazil’s military dictatorship, Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing politician, returned to the country after years of self-imposed exile. Not long after setting up home in Rio de Janeiro with his wife and their five children, he was arrested, on January 20, 1971. His wife, Eunice, was also detained and interrogated, and she never saw her husband again: only much later was it confirmed that Rubens had been tortured and murdered not long after his arrest. In the years that followed, Eunice earned a law degree and became a human-rights advocate, working tirelessly to secure a measure of justice for her husband and thousands of others whose lives were destroyed by the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

The title of “I’m Still Here,” the director Walter Salles’s stirring new drama about the Paiva family, comes, like the movie itself, from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the youngest of Rubens and Eunice’s children. It can be read as either a defiant declaration or a bitter lament. (Eunice is played by Fernanda Torres, and her superbly controlled performance is both subtle and capacious enough to accommodate either possibility.) By the time the film winds to a close, decades after Rubens’s disappearance, the fact that Eunice is still here—that she has outlived the regime that tore her family apart—is a proud testament to her strength and resilience. But her endurance has also been one prolonged defeat; as Eunice herself says in the film’s closing passages, having to go on without Rubens, not knowing if he would ever return, condemned her and her family to “eternal psychological torture.”

Salles’s movie, his first narrative feature since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” means to convey some sense of that torture. But it also dilutes the sting, folding the raw anguish of Eunice’s experience in a warm, gauzy blanket of humanist storytelling. A gentle glow suffuses the opening moments, set during an idyllic afternoon at the beach, and later seems to pervade each lovingly appointed room of Rubens and Eunice’s nearby home. Everything we see and hear exalts the Paivas as a model of infectious, unruly familial joy: good-natured sibling banter, spontaneous dance parties, generously overflowing meals, and a seemingly open invitation to friends, neighborhood kids, and even a stray dog, which, naturally, is adopted the moment it wanders inside. Salles himself knew the Paivas and visited their home as a child, a fact that, along with the vibrant, funky specificity of Carlos Conti’s production design, may account for the depth of feeling he brings to these spirited hangouts. The action, radiantly shot by the cinematographer Adrian Teijido, flows effortlessly between indoors and outdoors; the house’s proximity to the ocean is at once a matter-of-fact physical reality and an easy metaphor for the family’s ebullient sense of freedom.

But it is Eunice, at once a steadying presence and a sharp observer, who seems most conscious of the growing threats to that freedom. The movie’s very first shot, beautiful yet full of foreboding, finds her swimming in the Atlantic, her peace momentarily disturbed by the roar of a military helicopter overhead. Later, as the Paivas pose for a photo with friends on the beach, Eunice’s smile wavers at the increasingly familiar sight of armed soldiers in vehicles tearing past. She says nothing; Rubens (Selton Mello), who keeps a close watch on the situation with friends and colleagues, seems initially unworried. Moment by moment, though, anxiety mounts. The Paivas send their eldest child, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), to London for the holidays, keeping her and her political-activist streak temporarily out of harm’s way. Not long after news breaks that a Swiss diplomat has been kidnapped by Brazilian left-wing guerrillas, armed men show up at the Paivas’ door and haul Rubens away for a “deposition.” We never see what happens to him; from this point onward, the camera remains all but glued to Eunice, trapped at home with her children. The men, terse, unsmiling, and unfailingly polite, keep them under siege for days.

“I’m Still Here” is at its strongest in these inherently tense sequences, in part because Salles doesn’t sensationalize. His approach, during the initial shock of Rubens’s removal, is simply to drain away every prior trace of warmth and ebullience. The curtains are drawn, plunging the house into unnatural shadows; a terrible silence descends, broken only when Eunice offers the men food and asks if they know when her husband will return. The hush and the darkness only deepen when Eunice and her second-eldest daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are taken to a nearby facility for questioning; Eliana, we later learn, is released after a day, but Eunice is imprisoned for nearly two weeks, assaulted with questions about her husband’s affiliations with “terrorists,” and asked to identify other suspected subversives in photographs. She quietly meets this gruelling ordeal head on, keeping her fear outwardly in check and trying her best to ignore the screams issuing forth from neighboring cells.

Torres’s performance here is a marvel of expressive restraint, every glance merging horrified disbelief and meticulous self-control. Even when Eunice finally returns home, scrubs away twelve days of grime, and reunites with her children, she maintains her composure with a sureness that is almost indescribably moving. Tellingly, it is not until well after Eunice’s release that she registers anything even close to anger. She also manages to keep her temper in check when she learns of secrets that Rubens and his allies had kept from her, and when those in a position to help her insist that they cannot. Only once, when fate cruelly twists the knife—the one development that feels like a manipulation too far—does Eunice finally lose control, raise her voice, and unleash the full force of her rage against the junta. By this point, you may genuinely fear for her safety. The Paivas are being watched, after all, by forces that regard even the mildest criticism as an act of treason.

In more than one sense, “I’m Still Here” is a movie about the strategic withholding of information. Rubens is arrested for reasons unspecified. For years, the junta, trying to maintain the illusion of normalcy, refuses to acknowledge that he was even arrested. Efforts to raise awareness of Rubens’s disappearance generally bypass local media outlets, most of which are assumed to be propaganda arms of the government. Eunice herself is both a victim and a perpetrator of deception; kept in the dark about some of her husband’s activities, she, in turn, hides the worst news from her children for as long as possible, including the growing likelihood that Rubens is dead.

It was shrewd of the screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, to stick so closely to Eunice’s perspective, trusting the audience to identify with her uncertainty, her vulnerability, and her instinctive urge to protect her children. But “I’m Still Here” has its own share of tactical evasions, and its dramatic caginess winds up blunting its own emotional force. It’s no surprise that none of the supporting characters can match Eunice for nuance or gravity, but you may long for at least a rougher-edged vision of the Paivas’ family life, which feels strangely idealized even under these least ideal of circumstances. The children are each given a handy distinguishing trait or two: Veroca is the worldly firebrand on the cusp of adulthood, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) the lovable goofball. At various points, we see grainy home-movie footage of the Paivas family—a stylish yet curiously superfluous touch, given that the more conventionally shot domestic material already seems to have been fed through a nostalgic filter.

Even Eunice seems to get short shrift as the story leaps ahead twenty-five years to 1996, the year in which the family finally achieves a measure of legal closure. The victory is the result of a years-long fight for justice, but the script provides almost no sense of how it was actually fought, and it falls entirely on Torres’s shoulders to provide hints of the moral and intellectual spark that drove Eunice to embark on her remarkable second act. This narrative blip is followed by another: it’s 2014, and Eunice, now battling Alzheimer’s disease in her eighties, struggles to hold on to her memories of all that her family has lived through. It’s hard not to interpret this sequence as an understated warning to contemporary Brazil, which, in the era of Jair Bolsonaro, has shown signs of a troubling historical amnesia about the dictatorship.

Inadvertently driving home these modern-day political echoes, local far-right groups attempted to mount a boycott of “I’m Still Here” when it was released in Brazilian theatres, in November. Those efforts proved happily and laughably unsuccessful: Salles’s film became the highest-grossing Brazilian movie since the pandemic, and it has enjoyed a similarly warm embrace abroad. The movie won a screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall, and just last week it received three Academy Award nominations—for Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, and Best Actress (Torres). Oscar buzz is never inherently interesting, but the energy surrounding “I’m Still Here” has undeniable cultural resonance in an industry not known for its excessive recognition of Latin American filmmakers and performers. Torres is only the second Brazilian performer ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar; the first was none other than her mother, the veteran actor Fernanda Montenegro, who was nominated for her splendid work in Salles’s 1998 drama, “Central Station,” in which she plays a curmudgeonly retired schoolteacher who makes a living writing letters for the illiterate, and who briefly appears in “I’m Still Here.” Montenegro didn’t win—she lost to Gwyneth Paltrow, for “Shakespeare in Love”—and the perceived snub, no less than her performance, has become the stuff of legend in Brazil.

There are a couple of sly callbacks to “Central Station” in “I’m Still Here,” the slyest of which involves the deliberate misreading of a handwritten letter. (Here, as in the earlier film, a small lie becomes an act of love.) The other, although amply reported on in the film press, is worth discovering for yourself; it’s a lovely moment, though also, it would seem, an ingeniously contrived one. I suspect that Salles, in giving Torres such a star-making showcase, while also referencing Montenegro’s own, means to jog the memories of more than a few Academy voters, perhaps in hopes that they might be moved to rectify at least one historical injustice. ♦

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

Home    
Games    
Auto News    
Headline    
News    
Tools    
Community    
Focus