Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen level of acclaim and success, even given the film’s already notable pedigree. It was adapted by screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the same name, which centered his mother Eunice Paiva’s decades-long struggle to achieve some measure of justice for her husband Rubens Paiva, a former congressman who was tortured and murdered in 1971 under Brazil’s military dictatorship. I’m Still Here struck a chord in Brazil in the wake of an attempted coup in 2023 by ousted President Jair Bolsonaro, and ranked in the top five of the country’s box office in 2024. Yet it has quite evidently transcended national boundaries, particularly after its unexpected nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. On reflection, it shouldn’t be surprising that a bracing political thriller about the effects of state violence on individuals and families resonates with audiences in the United States as well as in Brazil — after all, Salles’ disciplined evocation of historical state repression rings with contemporary urgency for any nation besieged by antidemocratic forces.
I’m Still Here begins with the Paiva family unified, living in a spacious home in Rio de Janeiro with easy access to the beach. Salles depicts their lives as socially lively and largely idyllic, albeit with regular disruptions — helicopters flying overhead and roadside military frisks, for instance. There is no obvious protagonist at first, with Salles instead presenting a family portrait: Eunice (Fernanda Torres), Rubens (Selton Mello), and their five children are given roughly equal emphasis. This dynamic is ruthlessly disrupted when armed men show up at the Paiva home, take Rubens to a “deposition,” and occupy their home overnight. The next morning, Eunice and her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are taken for questioning as well. Eunice then becomes the film’s center of gravity — Salles follows her as she is questioned by a military commander, then thrown into a cell for 12 days, unsure of her daughter’s or husband’s whereabouts. On returning home, haggard, she finds Eliana and her children present, but Rubens is nowhere to be found. She begins the long process of tracking him down and fighting for his release, with the aid of a lawyer and a group of friends and acquaintances. She soon learns that Rubens had been working with a group of their mutual friends to deliver letters to families with news of relatives who had been disappeared, thus making him a target of the regime.
Torres initially plays Eunice with a relaxed, vibrant physicality, thriving with her family despite the threatening political environment. Her performance undergoes a series of seismic shifts with each new intrusion of the regime into her life: her voice drops and her posture grows guarded when armed men take Rubens away from their home and stay there overnight, and she fights just to keep composure when interrogated and held captive for days on end. On return to her home, her previous vivacity has been shorn away, replaced by a more cautious, considered attitude, yet also a dogged directness and a rigid physical presence when fighting to gain information about her husband or to keep her children safe. As time drags on under suspected surveillance and with no concrete news of Rubens, exhaustion and fear incrementally close in, until news that Rubens is almost certainly dead forces Eunice to build a new life for herself and her children. Torres, under Salles’ direction, shows in the film’s final act, which follows Eunice into later stages of her life, that she achieves fulfillment on her own terms, but that some fundamental happiness has been taken away and cannot be retrieved.
Salles’ aesthetic approach follows a similar direction to Torres’ dynamic performance. The early scenes, with the Paiva family still happy and intact, are light and filled with buoyancy, with home videos and family photographs a dominant motif that lends a nostalgic tenor to this time. But the film, almost instantly, takes on a semi-Gothic aesthetic as the military closes in on Rubens and Eunice — the previously warm Paiva house is shadowed and menacing when occupied by armed men, and Eunice’s imprisonment depicts a full-fledged plunge into darkness, accompanied by the muffled sounds of torture. The Paiva house, for the film’s remainder, is dull, tense, and empty in comparison to its initial liveliness, with one brief flash of hope in a suddenly light-filled kitchen, a scene that is then almost immediately undercut by the news of Rubens’ death.
This visual and aural approach by Salles and his collaborators, including director of photography Adrian Teijido and editor Affonso Gonçalves, in conjunction with Torres’s anchoring performance, coalesce into a film that depicts not a hard-fought triumph against a repressive regime, but of a dogged, drawn-out fight simply to preserve one’s humanity and to push one’s government to acknowledge their own criminal actions — a fight which does not end in uncomplicated celebration even in the best of outcomes. In this light, I’m Still Here brings to mind Todd Haynes’ 2019 film Dark Waters, a similarly tense social thriller — also edited by Gonçalves — which provides no catharsis in its story of a corporate lawyer who sued DuPont after discovering their use of carcinogenic chemicals in consumer products. Like Haynes, Salles does not fall into the easy traps of indulging in false hope or undue despair when depicting injustice. Rather, with narrative tautness and emotional clarity, he keeps his focus trained on the necessity of acting against state oppression, even when the fabric of one’s life is irreversibly rent.
DIRECTOR: Walter Salles; CAST: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro, Antonio Saboia; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: January 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 15 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
Comments are closed.