Nominated for three Oscars this year including Best Picture, the gripping Brazilian drama I'm Still Here may look back at a particularly unpleasant period in its country's history, but it also feels uncomfortably relevant to the current moment in our own country. Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres gives a powerful, emotionally resonant performance as a woman who endured years of uncertainty after her husband was seized by forces of the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1971. I'm Still Here has been a massive box-office hit in Brazil, where memories of that time period linger, and it serves as a potent reminder of how easily a seemingly calm everyday life can be shattered by political violence and repression.
That seemingly calm existence unfolds over the course of the film's first half-hour, even as a sense of dread builds in the background. Eunice (Torres) lives with her husband, engineer and former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), in a lovely house in Rio de Janeiro with their five boisterous children. They spend family time at the beach and the ice cream parlor, play games, and make plans to move into a new house that they're preparing to have built. Director Walter Salles captures the warmth of the family interactions as well as the reality of living in a nation under authoritarian rule.
Daily activities continue as normal, while occasional military transports rumble by on the street outside, and the news offers reports about rebel groups kidnapping foreign diplomats. In a harrowing early scene, eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) and her friends are stopped at a checkpoint on their way home from the movies, and only saved from further harassment because one of them is able to verify his father's credentials as a lawyer.
Rubens seems unafraid of the potential danger to himself, and he rejects entreaties from friends to join them in relocating to England. Eunice convinces him to at least send Vera along to study abroad, just a short time before mysterious armed men come to the Paiva house and whisk Rubens away. Soon afterward, they take Eunice and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) as well, subjecting Eunice to 12 days of interrogation before letting her go.
Thus begins the family's long period of instability, as Eunice engages in futile efforts to find out what happened to her husband, while also taking care of her children and shielding her youngest kids from the full truth. Torres conveys the anguish and determination that Eunice deals with every day, never giving up the fight, but also never losing sight of her responsibilities as a mother. The children are slightly less distinctive as characters, and it takes a little while to differentiate the three teenage daughters. But over time, Kosovski gives Eliana a level of determination similar to her mother's after her own briefer ordeal, and Herszage finds the balance between Vera's rebelliousness and vulnerability.
Vera is also the source of the family's lovely 8mm home movies, which Salles intersperses during tender as well as tense moments. He shoots the rest of the movie in equally gorgeous 35mm, giving it a mix of gritty immediacy and glowing nostalgia, which reflects the dichotomy of the family's experience. In his first narrative feature since 2012, Salles shakes off the blandness of his previous true-life social-issue dramas The Motorcycle Diaries and On the Road to deliver a story with more urgency and nuance.
That urgency fades a bit during the movie's last half-hour, with two lengthy epilogues that fast-forward first to 1996 and then to 2014. These segments depict follow-up events that might have been relegated to closing title cards in other docudramas, and they emphasize the way that in reality, stories like this don't have definitive endings.
At the same time, the final act struggles to make the adult versions of the Paiva children (including Eunice's son Marcelo, who wrote the movie's source material) compelling to watch, and the tension in the story has almost entirely dissipated. It's sweet to see Torres' real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro, as the elderly Eunice, although her role is little more than a cameo. It's a nice nod to Montenegro's own Oscar-nominated work with Salles in 1998's Central Station, but it doesn't add much to the narrative.
Even if that closing stretch is a little underwhelming, it still adds to the overall sense of the injustice that Eunice and her children faced, and it speaks to their resilience in the face of that adversity. As the title indicates, they prevailed by persevering, by not giving in to despair or hopelessness. There's beauty in that perseverance, along with the pain, and it's worth holding onto, as much now as it was then.
I'm Still Here
Rated PG-13
Directed by Walter Salles
Starring Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Luiza Kosovski
