I’m Still Here
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 2 hours 16 minutes
Stars: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello
Writers: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega (From Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir)
Director: Walter Salles
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
A chillingly authentic account of dignity in the face of cruelty, I’m Still Here enlists compelling performances to relate the true story of a family caught up as collateral damage in a period of political upheaval.
The year is 1971. We find Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), a middle-aged mom and wife, swimming in the warm waters of a beach in Rio de Janeiro, immediately recognizable thanks to the nearby peaks of Morro dois Irmãos. The water laps softly; the sound of her five children playing on the beach adds a touch of familial serenity.
But Eunice is troubled as she gazes toward shore. Rumbling along the promenade between the beach and her house comes a truck laden with helmeted soldiers. The truck passes, but Eunice’s concern remains: Brazil is in a period of political turmoil, and no one knows when or if the conflict will come calling for them.
For Eunice and her family, the worst happens all too soon: One afternoon, men claiming to be “from the army” arrive at the front door. They have come to take Eunice’s husband, Rubens (Selton Mellow) for questioning. An architect and former legislator, Rubens is suspected of lending aid to the nation’s insurrectionists.
“I will be home in time for the souffle,” Rubens smiles weakly as he dons his suit jacket. But the couple’s eyes speak a tortured truth: Both know they may never see each other again.
So begins a sometimes somber, often terrifying, search for the truth regarding Rubens’ fate. Is he imprisoned? Has he been exiled? Is he undergoing torture? Is he already dead?
After enduring her own weeklong prison ordeal, Eunice stands stoically — and dangerously — alone. At first, she hides the litany of awful possible outcomes from her children, assuring them for weeks, then months, that their father will return. Meanwhile, she digs through a roiling bureaucracy of police and prisons, desperately seeking any evidence of Rubens’ whereabouts.
Director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) has long explored the troubled history and human resilience that seems to define South America. Working from a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva — the son of Eunice and Rubens — Salles and a pair of screenwriters usher us through a political and social universe that seems utterly foreign, yet dismayingly immediate.
Most jarring are the repeated sequences of Eunice, her life turned upside down and herself dogged by the threat of immediate “disappearance,” pushing through a Rio that remains maddeningly normal. Traffic still clogs the streets; families still stroll the sidewalks; businesses seem to operate undisturbed. For the people of Rio, the human capacity for denial — pretending all is normal when everything is anything but — becomes at once a survival strategy and an enabling tool benefitting society’s worst oppressors.
This year or any year, you will witness no screen performance more powerful than that of Torres as the woman who sets her face to the winds of bureaucratic aggression and forges steadfastly ahead. Confronting hopeless bureaucrats (who themselves just want to survive the current turmoil) and rifling through mountains of documents, Torres’s face betrays Eunice’s journey from confusion to despair to anger to thirst for justice — not just on behalf of her husband, but also the untold thousands who were shoved into Brazilian government cars to face uncertain ends.
Salles amplifies the impact of I’m Still Here by filming in the actual locales where the events took place. From the nondescript police station to the pillared bank where Eunice discovers she cannot access her husband’s accounts, the settings offer silent testimony to the grim fact that evil and oppression don’t unfold in haunted houses or dark alleys: They come at you in an unmarked car, smiling tightly, saying they only want to ask a few questions.
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