As the title might suggest, Walter Salles’ first dramatic feature in 12 years is ultimately a celebration of Brazil — not only of the resilience of its liberalism under tyrannical rulers, but of its sunlight, its carnival spirit and the delicious blue of the sea that rolls onto Rio de Janeiro’s broad beaches. I’m Still Here tells the true story of the Paivas and their five children, whose easy, giggling closeness is documented by middle daughter Eliana with her Super 8 camera — the Christmas present of choice in 1970 — in a film we see within the film. The military dictatorship has its grip on the country. It is an act of rebellion to be happy.
So we watch the Paivas, a couple still visibly in love after a few decades of marriage, playing beach volleyball with their children, dad-dancing to pop songs and eating lavish dinners. Their rented house is already too small for them all, but there are always extra friends at meals; when their son Marcelo scoops up a dog on the beach, it is inevitable that they will adopt it. Rubens is an engineer and indulgent dad; his wife Eunice, whose story this becomes, is the angel of the house. Eliana’s scratchy, wiggling, orange-hued home movies mesh with Salles’s own handheld camera and rapidly cut montages; it is as if the images themselves are having a party. When Rubens is suddenly arrested, shattering this picture, there is a visceral sense of shock.
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Salles has based his film on a memoir, also called I’m Still Here, written by Marcelo as an adult, that pieces together his mother’s memories of her husband’s disappearance and her own incarceration for several weeks afterwards. There is a harrowing series of interrogations where Eunice is initially painfully polite. She knows nothing. Rubens was once a member of Congress when Brazil was a democracy and spent a period in exile after the 1964 coup, but he steered clear of politics after he returned. Surely there is nothing to know.
But, as one of his friends says later, anyone who could make a difference can’t stand back and do nothing. Salles is superbly adept at slipping us hints — an oddly timed knock on the front door, a phone call Rubens leaves the room to answer — while also showing Eunice’s dawning recognition that her beloved husband had a life he kept secret, ostensibly for her own protection. She was loved, but excluded. As the months go by and Rubens fails to return, she will be changed by events in ways she could never have expected.
Fernanda Torres, a cultural fixture in Brazil, has an emotional delicacy as Eunice that conveys, through the smallest and subtlest signals, what it costs her to hold back her anxiety and anger for the sake of her family. It is a performance that should catapult her into the awards race, 25 years after her mother Fernanda Montenegro was Oscar-nominated for Salles’ breakthrough feature, Central Station. The older Fernanda appears in this film as Eunice in her dotage, when she was living with Alzheimer’s but could still recognize a photograph of Rubens. This too is a cultural celebration, albeit of a different sort: mother and daughter icons of Brazilian cinema, appearing in the same film.
The aged Eunice appears in one of several long segments, followed by explanatory end titles, that pick up the family’s story in 1996 and again in 2014. It is easy enough to see why Salles wants to show the next generation picking up the democratic baton — the title foreshadows it, after all — but this long comet’s tail of additional stories works to deflate the impact of the terrible crime that upended their lives in 1971. The earlier story has the tension of a thriller, maintained at snapping point through the arrest, the occupation of the house by an armed guard and Eunice’s interrogation: a slow squeeze of terror, tightened imperceptibly by Salles over a gripping hour and a half. That terror could be overturned with a brief epilogue; instead, it dribbles away.
But perhaps this is a minor quibble, given the strength and urgency of the story that goes before. Salles has a purpose here. He is clearly not simply recording what happened; this is a film of political advocacy, warning against forgetting what tyranny did to the country and the stains it left behind. As much as it is a celebration, it is his defence of Brazil.
Title: I’m Still Here
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Walter Salles
Screenwriters: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega
Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro
Sales agent: Goodfellas
Running time: 2 hr 15 mins