NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Chalk it up to historical ignorance, but it wasn’t until the end credits that I realized the Brazilian film I’m Still Here was based on a true story. This probably won’t be much of a surprise to South American viewers, but North American audiences might know about the political turmoil in Brazil without knowing the story of Rubens and Eunice Paiva.
The film is set in Rio de Janeiro under the rule of President Emílio Médici, and it’s a city full of military barricades and harrassing traffic stops. It’s also where the Paiva family lives in a bustling house where guests are always coming and going. Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former congressman who had been living in exile following a 1964 military coup. His wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) looks the other way as her husband hosts clandestine meetings about the state of the country, and about friends and colleagues who have been removed from their homes and never heard from again.
These early scenes most obviously recall Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, another movie about early ’70s class divide and political turmoil set inside an upper-middle class house. I’m Still Here is far less picaresque than that film, but it also concerns itself with the quotidian details of the family’s daily life: the clothes they wear, the food and drinks they prepare, the records they dance to.
Perhaps the Paivas think they’re shielded from political retaliation in Rio, but then trucks full of soldiers start rolling into town. And then some men arrive at their front door and order Rubens to come with them. He dresses himself in a suit, Eunice kisses him goodbye, and he assures her he’ll be back. But he isn’t, and we wonder if either of them knew, implicitly, that this is the last time they’d see each other.
The rest of I’m Still Here considers the fallout from Rubens’ disappearance: how Eunice is herself imprisoned for a couple weeks, how their home is under constant surveillance, how she tries to remain hopeful for her five children, some of whom seem to better understand the true gravity of the situation than others. Perhaps her optimism is a façade, but then maybe she is a bit hopeful.
The movie jumps into the future once, and then again, showing how these events have reverberated through the generations, and it uses Super 8 home movie footage as a shorthand for fading memories. I was reminded of the great Argentinian film The Official Story, also about a well-to-do family and the consequences of sociopolitical strife. That movie was about the complicity of silence in moments of historical atrocities, and this one is, in Eunice’s refusal to cave, about powering through in spite of it.
I’m Still Here was directed by Walter Salles, whose 1998 film Central Station starred Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro in an Oscar-nominated performance. That movie was set in a Brazil still finding its footing within its newfound democracy, and it told its story with bittersweet whimsy. There’s none of that whimsy here. Torres’ performance in I’m Still Here, also nominated for an Oscar, is the real selling point, and she carries herself with a steely-eyed dignity that’s emblematic of the whole film.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.