It’s been twelve years since we’ve seen a Walter Salles film. The Brazilian director’s last film, On The Road, was a surprisingly muted adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel. It’s logical that his return is I’m Still Here, a movie that carries the weight of passing time. Based on a true story, it takes place in Rio de Janeiro near the beginning of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1960s. As counterculture and free love falls upon the streets of Brazil, so too does armored trucks packed with gun-toting soldiers hunting communist “terrorists”. Anyone viewed as a political enemy was in danger of being round up, interrogated, even murdered. This includes Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former Labour congressman who left politics years ago, but his principles are intact, which puts him in danger of being targeted by the growing military presence.

In the film’s first thirty minutes, the Paiva family lives in relative tranquility. Rubens’s wife, Eunice (an absolutely phenomenal Fernanda Torres) keeps track of the household, including four daughters and one son. As soldiers proliferate around them, the Paivas live freely and casually, planning construction on a new home. They aren’t ignorant of their surroundings. Many of Rubens’s friends are fleeing to Europe, and encourage him to do the same, but he wants to stay in his homeland; even as his oldest daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage), gets pulled over and searched in the middle of a tunnel, simply for dressing like a hippie. Their home is bohemian and joyful, rebellious in the face of their country’s political turmoil. It all comes crashing down when armed men in plain clothes come into their house and take Rubens away. They tell Eunice he’s needed for a deposition, but it feels much more ominous than that.

Eventually, the same men ask Eunice and another of her daughters, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), to come in for questioning as well. They’re placed in the backseat of a car and a felt bag is put over their head. They’re brought to a damp, shadowy prison where they’re seated for a classic, swinging-light interrogation on their knowledge of local communists. Eunice pleads with them: she doesn’t know, and where is Rubens? Eunice is kept imprisoned for weeks, without any knowledge of Eliana or Rubens. Never given the chance to shower or even change her clothes, she’s locked in a solitary cell until she’s once again asked the same questions about her knowledge of communism. The experience is surreal and de-stabilizing, and when she’s finally released and sent back home, she’s given no explanation that could bring any comfort. She finds Eliana back at home, but there’s still no word on Rubens, and now the police claim they never arrested him in the first place.

From this point on, I’m Still Here becomes a film about perseverance. Eunice must continue being a mother to her many children, but she is also obsessed with discovering just what happened to her husband. As the years pass, her and the children come to terms with the fact that he will never return, but the absence of knowledge drives them to continue hunting for any morsel of information. Eunice Paiva went on to law school and became a human rights lawyer, her main cause is solving the unknown deaths of the dictatorship that tortured the Brazilian population for twenty-four years. Salles doesn’t pay much attention, if at all, on her work as an attorney. Instead, the film pays credence to her indominable spirit in Rubens’s absence, but also chronicles how his disappearance meticulously cuts into her existence, even as she lives into old age.

Fernanda Torres may not seem like the film’s star for the first thirty minutes. Indeed, the performance mirrors Eunice’s own growth in confidence and leadership. At once a dutiful wife who coached her children – and, to a lesser extent, her husband – on how to avoid trouble with the government police, she develops her own political consciousness, informed not only by her circumstances, but in the circumstances of others. Underneath her own trauma, she finds a network of people in their own desperate search. I’m Still Here doesn’t have a lot of kinetic action, and it’s narrative drama is mostly internal amongst the characters. But Salles and the film’s script (by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega) really cuts to the quick of it’s main theme: articulating the wholesale consequences of authoritarianism. There is torture of the body and then there’s torture of the mind, and both can linger for a lifetime.

Another recurring theme of I’m Still Here is Eunice’s refusal to play a victim. With her husband’s disappearance gaining attention from the press, she makes sure her and the children smile for every article’s photograph. She understands this is an important performance, making sure a dictatorial regime doesn’t see your emotional defeat. In a very powerful coda (where Eunice is played by legendary Brazilian actor – and Torres’s own mother – Fernanda Montenegro), we get full understanding that beneath the smile, there was a toll, and that even in triumph, overcoming psychological warfare leaves heavy scars. As Eunice, Fernanda Torres is absolutely spectacular. Her portrayal goes far beyond parental stiff-upper-lip courage, but seeps deep into Eunice’s helplessness and insecurity. One could never understand the torture Eunice underwent, but Torres helps bring her pain to the surface and sustains it beautifully for over two hours. No easy feat.

This feels very much in the tradition of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Aquarius, another Brazilian film from 2016. Unlike I’m Still Here,  Aquarius isn’t about military dictatorship, but the country’s troubled political history hangs drearily over all events. Political instability doesn’t make Brazil unique, but it’s telling to see how its artists choose to display it. Mendonca Filho and Salles both take the long way, giving the audience a real sense of the consequences of oppression. But both movies take pains to pay homage to their heroines’ undefeatable bravery and principle, and they make the logical case that this is what it takes to defeat a totalitarian enemy, if not directly than at least spiritually. I found that message moving in 2016 – the first time Trump was elected into office. Eight years later, we have a similar scenario, and I can’t think of a more important message to spread among the masses.

 

Directed by Walter Salles