I’m Still Here: Fernanda Torres shines in Walter Salles’ Brazilian family saga
By retelling the real-life story of activist Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose husband was abducted by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971, director Walter Salles is speaking of and to the nation once again.
A swimmer floats on her back off Copacabana Beach as a helicopter flies above. She is Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose five children are playing beach volleyball while a stray dog keeps interfering. The family’s blissful life of affection and closeness is signalled by the children’s adoption of the dog, agreed to by their easy-going, burly engineer father Rubens (Selton Mello), the figure on whom, at first, the film centres.
Meals with adult friends and the children’s sing-alongs equally carry weight in these early scenes because the film, adapted from a memoir by one of the children, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, also draws on director Walter Salles’s personal memories of this real-life family. He spent time with the Paivas during his adolescence, in the early 1970s, envying their intimacy and openness. Love and duty are woven into the film’s fabric.
The Paivas live in a gorgeous rented house next to the beach. Fabulous Brazilian music – Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa – helps evoke a sense of 60s and 70s youth culture. There’s a resemblance, too, to the sprawling Mexico City family life depicted in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), set in the same year, 1970.
In contrast to Roma’s monochrome, however, I’m Still Here had me thinking of Paul Simon’s 1973 song ‘Kodachrome’: “They give us the nice bright colours / They give us the greens of summers.” The teenage eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) wields a Super 8 camera, and the grain and hues of 35mm film enhance that period feel, courtesy of cinematographer Adrian Teijido. It is Vera who has the family’s first encounter with Brazil’s military government, when she and her friends are treated roughly at a roadblock; but she is otherwise fortunate to be sent away to study in London before the beautifully established familial Eden is brought to a close.
Anonymous, thuggish men come to the house, telling Eunice they’re waiting for her husband. They post themselves about the shared rooms, giving nothing away, while family life proceeds around them – Eunice even offers them food. When Rubens comes home, he is soon driven away to “give a deposition”. We are given no indication of what he’s done to deserve this.
Days pass before Eunice herself is ordered into a car alongside 15-year-old Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), the second oldest child, and black hoods are put over their heads. Locked in a cell, Eunice listens to the screams of the tortured and hopes for snatches of information. She’s made to examine books of mugshots, her husband and daughter among them. After 12 days she is released back home and is relieved to find Eliana there too.
Given no information regarding Rubens’s fate, with the discovery that she has no access to his funds, Eunice is forced to move the family out. She takes a law degree at the age of 48. The first of two jumps forward in time takes us to 1998. Eunice has become a powerhouse activist at the centre of the campaign to find out what happened to the hundreds of desaparecidos (disappeared) like her husband. Fernanda Torres’s restrained portrayal of this resilient matriarch, who retains her dignity even in the most terrifying moments, is one of total conviction (and won her a Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination).
The second time-leap, to 2014, sees Torres replaced in the role by her real-life mother Fernanda Montenegro, the revered star of Salles’s breakthrough feature Central Station (1998). With Eunice now in a wheelchair and living from dementia, the family prepares one more signature meal. By this point you may feel that Salles is letting the saga drift, but that’s a consequence of his sense of duty to a story that has wider ramifications.
Thinking about Central Station sent me back to an interview I did with Salles when it was released. He talked about a “culture of cynicism and indifference” that prevailed in the Brazil of the 1960s and 1970s and said that he prefers to make films “fundamentally related to me”. The Paivas are emblematic of resistance to that cynicism. In Central Station he got to the rural heart of what his huge, near ungovernable nation was all about. Here, in Brazil’s post-Bolsonaro moment, he’s speaking of and to the nation again.
Biopics are rarely to my taste but the power of this film overcame my prejudice. Perhaps ignorance of Eunice’s story – already well-known in Brazil – helped dispel any sense of the pre-ordained. But in any case, given Torres’s brilliant, understated performance and Salles’s deep understanding of what he’s trying to achieve, the film would stand as a shining, thoroughly convincing exception.
► I’m Still Here is in UK cinemas 21 February.