In the last few years we've received a crop of films from Argentina (Rojo; A Common Crime; Azor) and Chile (1976; El Conde) addressing those South American nations' years under the rule of fascist military dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century. Now Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles reopens and hopes to salve his own country's wounds with I'm Still Here, adapted from a 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. In 1971, Paiva's father Rubens, a former congressman turned civil engineer, was taken from his home, never to be seen again.
The focus of Salles' film isn't on Rubens (for how could it be, given his absence), but on his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and her balancing act of trying to find out what happened to her husband while protecting her five children. The opening scenes, in which Rubens (Selton Mello) is still present, paint a picture of a middle class family living a perfectly content life in an enviable house a mere stone's throw away from Rio's Copacabana beach. Eunice and Rubens are constantly throwing parties, while kids scurry in and out through an always-open front door (Salles was himself one of the neighbourhood children who spent time in the Paivas' home) and teenagers dance to Tropicalia records (it's unlikely you'll hear a funkier soundtrack in 2025).
But in the background Rubens is living a secret life, one his wife is aware of but has decided not to address. Strangers appear at their door and pass mysterious packages to Rubens, who often leaves the house after receiving phone calls, claiming he has to go to his office. If her country wasn't being ruled by a military junta, Eunice might suspect her husband of having an affair. Whether Eunice knows of Rubens' involvement with the resistance is left ambiguous, but Torres plays it in a manner that suggests she has decided to ignore it and keep her head in the sand.
The truth of her country is made explicit for Eunice when a group of men arrive and take Rubens away, claiming to require him to sign a deposition. The following day Eunice and her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are bundled into a car, masks placed over their heads, and brought to a military prison, where Eunice is questioned regarding her husband's activities. After 12 days Eunice is released, her daughter having been sent home a week earlier. Rubens however has disappeared, or rather "been disappeared." Eunice sets out on a decades-long campaign to find out what happened to him.
Salles' approach to this story shuns convention by focussing on the personal rather than political effects of Rubens' disappearance. Eunice's campaigning largely occurs offscreen, Salles instead honing in on how she keeps her family together. Eunice and her older daughters quietly accept that they will likely never see Rubens again, while they try to shelter the younger children from the truth. Of course, children aren't that naive, and there are some heartbreaking moments that illustrate the family's realisation that they will have to live the rest of their life without their father. The film's most emotionally wrenching scene sees Eunice take her children to a food court, only to find herself surrounded and contrasted by obliviously happy families. As her eyes scan the court, they lock with those of her older daughters, all of these women trying not to break down in tears for the sake of the little ones.
Torres has rightly received plaudits for her performance. With the details of what's happening in her country largely left offscreen, Brazil's troubles are mapped on Eunice's increasingly lined face, which remains rigid even when she wants to collapse. Torres paints a portrait of a woman fighting back against a system she knows she can't beat by doing her best to get on with as normal a life as she can provide for her family. When a newspaper sympathetic to the resistance runs a story on Rubens' disappearance and asks Eunice and her family to pose for a portrait, Eunice insists that her family are seen smiling in the picture. The fascists may have taken her husband, but she refuses to give them her joy.
Aside from Torres, Salles has assembled a strikingly good ensemble. Torres' own mother Fernanda Montenegro (star of Salles' Central Station) appears as an aged Eunice in a 2014-set coda to deliver one final silent act of resilience. The actors who play Eunice's children in various stages of their lives are never less than convincing as siblings, and there's something undeniably touching about seeing them appear in the epilogue, now older than their mother was in the 1970s-set portion. The film's final act, set in 1996 and 2014, celebrates Brazil's rejection of fascism, but given what we know has occurred since, it's a bittersweet triumph. Eunice Paiva passed away in 2018, leaving us to wonder what she would make of today's world with its casual and open flirtation with the very sort of fascism that devastated her family.
Directed by: Walter Salles
Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Guilherme Silveira, Luiza Kosovski, Fernanda Montenegro
