Photo © Sony Pictures Classics
Fernanda Torres in 'I'm Still Here'
Fernanda Torres in 'I'm Still Here' (2024)
Brazil, like many Latin American nations in the ‘70s, was under a military dictatorship. The regime saw itself as locked in a war against the far left, but didn’t always distinguish the identity or ideology of its victims. Opposition was dangerous, as Rubens Paiva knew, when he returned to Brazil in 1970.
I’m Still Here, nominated by the Academy not only for Best International Feature Film but also, deservedly, Best Picture, dramatizes Paiva’s story. Based on the memoir of his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva. I’m Still Here stars Fernanda Torres as Paiva’s wife, Eunice in the 1970s, and—a brilliant stroke of casting—Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro as Eunice in the ‘90s. Torres also received a Best Actress nomination. I’m Still Here won the trophy for International Feature Film.
The eerie thing about Brazil’s dictatorship is the apparent normalcy of everyday life. We meet the Paiva family on the Rio de Janeiro beach, playing volleyball with Sugar Loaf looming in the background. On her way home that night from a movie, teenage daughter Veroca shares a joint with friends. The car slows as they spot a military police checkpoint in the tunnel ahead and they ditch the weed. They are motioned to the side, told to get out of the car. “Face the wall hippies!” order the soldiers. Similar scenes occurred during ‘60s unrest in the U.S.
The Paivas are unostentatiously affluent with a nice house and a faithful housekeeper. Rubens, a big Teddy Bear of a man, is a former Congressman working as an engineer. He’s out of politics, ostensibly, but what about those mysterious late-night calls he never explains to Fernanda—or those discussions with friends behind the closed door of his study?
Then comes the knock on the door. Plainclothesmen with pistols tucked under their shirts enter the house. Their leader, a sad-eyed man called Schneider, tells Rubens that they need him down at the station, a deposition, he explains. Fernanda follows to the door and watches bewildered as they take him away. She’ll never see her husband again.
Although Rubens kept secret his ties to the resistance, the family is under suspicion. Fernanda and her adolescent daughter Eliana are soon taken into custody. Eliana is released after a talking-to, but for Fernanda, the days tick on into weeks in her dark cement cell, the deadening monotony broken by brusque interrogations. From down the hall come the torture screams. One of her captors, a private, looks shamefaced. “I want you to know that I don’t approve,” he whispers. They release her with no word of her husband’s fate.
And then there’s a chilling reality about the sort of authoritarian regimes making a comeback in today’s world. Fernanda’s lawyer goes to court, obtains writs but receives no justice from a government that holds itself above the law and morality. While Rubens’ story finds its way to the back pages of foreign newspapers, given his prominence as an ex-Congressman, the Brazilian media is silent. Fernanda’s house is shadowed by unmarked police cars. She’s followed. They might be listening. Everyone is scared.
I’m Still Here jumps to 1996 when Fernanda finally receives Rubens’ death certificate from Brazil’s new government. Now an activist lawyer, she’s unhappy with the immunity granted her husband’s killers as the price for the military relinquishing power. What can Fernanda do in the face of that immunity and a society that would rather get on with it than reflect on an unpleasant past?
Working from a screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, director Walter Salles (Central Station) keeps the story moving along at an agreeable pace, giving just enough information to establish empathy with each family member, including the memoir’s author Marcelo, just a boy at the time of his father’s arrest. Varying the cinematography with archival footage of mass arrests and faux 8mm home movies, Salles shows an eye for telling visual details (In the Court of the Crimson King is in the family LP collection) and an ear for the sounds with snippets from Os Mutantes and other Brazilian bands from the period.
Torres drives the story forward in Fernanda’s many emotions and roles as caring wife, loving mom, grieving but unbending fighter. Before her interrogator, fear and trembling gradually overcome her. She’s confused but holds on to her herself, refusing to name names. Gathering her resolve once released, Fernanda seems a bit surprised at her own resourcefulness and righteous anger. It’s a terrific performance, memorable and worthy of the highest honors.
