A review of Walter Salles’s masterpiece ‘I’m Still Here.’
At this year’s Academy Awards, while it was Sean Baker’s Anora which took home the Best Picture prize, it is Brazilian director Walter Salles’s tour de force I’m Still Here that could very well generate the most urgent discussions in the days to come. In our rapidly changing world, regimes are rising and falling, Bangladesh is trying to rebuild itself after a popular uprising, and many other powerful countries are experiencing a rise in authoritarianism. In this volatile era we live in, I’m Still Here puts the focus on a very important chapter a Brazilian history – the rule of the military junta, and thereby brings to light the horrific abuses committed by the dictatorship, most egregiously in the form of extrajudicial arrest, torture, and disappearances.
When we first meet the family of Rubens Paiva, we are immediately attracted to the idyllic existence of the family. Rubens is a former congressman who lives with his wife Eunice and five children in a house in Rio de Janeiro a stone’s throw from the beach. The family is just about everything you would want a family to be – caring, supportive, and respectful towards each other. The love in the household is palpable. They appear financially stable, and while the parents are just the right degree of indulgence toward the children, the kids are showered with love but never spoiled. The stunning sandy beach is treated pretty much like a backyard, with the children running to and from the household sometimes dripping wet in their swimsuits. At the outset, their life seems like the picture of happiness. At this point, even if you have not read the film summary and have gone into the film with zero idea of what it is about, you may as a veteran moviegoer start to feel a sense of unease. This life almost seems too perfect – the viewer gets a sense that is all about to come crashing down.
To say their peace is shattered would be an understatement: one crushingly ordinary day, plainclothes military personnel arrive at their doorstep without warning. It is clear that they are armed, and they have come to take Paiva away for “questioning.” Paiva has been involved in what the military sees as subversive activities, which we later find out were mostly non-violent acts of solidarity and support for other victims of the regime. Nevertheless, Paiva is taken away in a car and he does not put up a fight. What follows is a harrowing, touching, poignant, and ultimately life-affirming depiction of how the family copes with the loss. The story is told from the point of view of Eunice, even though it is based on a memoir written by Paiva’s son Marcelo, who was just a little boy at the time of Ruben’s arrest.
Salles’s camera brings to life the exuberance of Brazilian life in the 70s – there is sunshine, joyful streetlife, and attractive people. The texture of the visuals immediately evokes the time and spirit while giving a sense that something horrible is brewing outside this beautiful micro-reality. As the years unfold, the style shifts ever so subtly – it is never jarring. The unbearable tragedy always looms over our heads, forcing the viewer to ask: how could such a government ever be allowed to come to power in a place as beautiful as this? There is that sense of a paradise lost, and one comes away with the feeling that nature’s bounties are wasted on humankind, because in our greed for absolute power and control, we wreck everything.
The performances in the film are on point, and the show-stealer in this case is Fernanda Torres, who plays the younger Eunice Paiva. She never hams up her performance or falls to pieces, but brings a vast range of emotions to the screen. She is a wife, a mother, a fighter, and not for a second does she give up the struggle to see that justice is done. The older Eunice is played by the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, who adds even more complex notes to the character.
A film like I’m Still Here cannot be called entertainment, exactly. It is, however, necessary viewing, because we need to honour the victims of extrajudicial disappearance. Just like fellow Oscar-nominee Nickel Boys, which also deals with custodial death, I’m Still Here manages to never exploit the story of the human beings who went through this trauma. There is not a whiff of sensationalism in the film – no gratuitous violence, empty stylistics, or elements done for shock value. This here is a brutal true story that simply needs to exist, to be told, as if it is saying: I’m the truth, I’m still here, and you cannot bury me.