I’m Still Here: Fernanda Torres Shines as a Mother Fighting for Her Family

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

In I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ first feature film in a dozen years, the Brazilian director manages an impressive feat of teleporting, placing the viewer inside the cheerful chaos of a large Brazilian family.

The palpable intimacy of these scenes no doubt reflects the 68-year-old director’s personal experience as a teenaged friend of the Paiva family, who are portrayed in the film, set during the dark years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. The story is based on the 2015 memoir of the youngest child of the family, Marcelo Rubens Paiva.

With three Oscar nominations — for best picture, best international picture, and best actress — I’m Still Here promises to be Salles’ biggest international success since his 1998 breakthrough, Central Station, with which this film shares some artistic and literal DNA.

Like Central Station, I’m Still Here is a study of maternal heroism. Central Station also earned Oscar nominations as best foreign film and best actress for its star, Fernanda Montenegro, now in her 90s. She makes a brief, potent cameo here, playing the elderly version of the family’s mother, Eunice. The younger version is played by Montenegro’s real-life daughter, Fernanda Torres, also an Oscar nominee.

I’m Still Here begins in 1970 and the Paiva family are enjoying their elegant beachside Rio De Janeiro home. Middle-aged dad Rubens makes a handsome living as a civil engineer and has lots of friends who drop in for drinks and dinner.

Mother Eunice is a soigné homemaker, who has a maid to help her care for their four daughters and son, Marcelo, the future memoirist. The eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage) makes Super-8 home movies which are integrated the film’s vibrant 35mm film stock, bringing a hazy warmth to these early scenes.

Veroca is preparing to go to England for university; the albums next to the record player, by King Crimson and T-Rex, suggest her Anglophile inclinations. Her adolescent sisters play at romance, dancing to Serge Gainsbourg’s breathy, erotic French song, “Je T’aime… Moi, Non Plus.” Marcello finds a stray dog on the beach and begs to keep it, despite the housekeeper’s (Pri Helena) annoyance.

Soon, a shadow falls over this sunny middle-class idyll. Rubens, we learn, was once a congressman in São Paulo who had been ousted by the new regime and, after a brief period in self-exile, had returned to Brazil, while keeping his ongoing covert political activities hidden from his family. Now the dictatorship, after a half dozen years in power, has started tightening the screws, aggressively persecuting any perceived enemies of the regime.

There’s news on the television of the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador. Things get more personal one night, when Veroca — sharing a car ride with friends, smoking a joint, and playing loud music — encounters a police roadblock. The kids are ordered out of the car and lined up at gunpoint as the police check their faces and IDs against photos of similar young people judged enemies of the state.

Shortly after, men in street clothes, carrying handguns, enter the Paiva’s house. They take Rubens (Selton Mello) away, ostensibly for questioning at the police station. When he doesn’t come home, Eunice goes to the station to inquire about his whereabouts but is given no information.

The children want to know when dad’s returning, and she tells them he’s travelling. The fiction doesn’t hold up. Both Eunice and 15-year-old, Eliana (Luiza Kozovski) are picked up, bags placed over their heads, and taken into a prison for interrogation, where they can hear the screams of other inmates.

Eliana is released after 24 hours; Eunice is kept for a dozen days, forced to repeatedly stare at pages of photographs, only one of whom she can identify, her children’s teacher.

When she comes home, takes a long shower, and asks Zeze to find the key to lock the front gate and faces this new phase of her and her family’s existence. The older children know something is deeply wrong. But even within the family, a code of silence is formed.

When Veroca returns from England, where she says the newspapers are full of news of Brazil, she demands to know what’s going on. Her sister tells her they don’t talk about such things here. Even the record player is silent.

Eunice keeps putting out quiet feelers to Rubens’ friends without much luck. Unable to make bank withdrawals without her husband’s signature, she has to fire the housekeeper, trades in some foreign currency to get by and finds a strategy for her future.

While continuing to seek information about her husband through legal channels, she begins to grow interested in the law, leading, eventually, to a decision to return to São Paulo and her parents’ home, and a return to school to study law.

Eunice’s transformation, while incremental, is astonishing. The film shifts forward 25 years. At 48, Eunice has earned her law degree. With the restoration of democracy, she begins taking various social justice causes, becoming an expert on Indigenous rights, and probing the torture, murder, and disappearances of victims of the military regime, including her husband.

The exposure of the crime brings relief, even an ambiguous kind of happiness. Smiling for the camera is something of a running joke in the film. At one point, when a newspaper journalist wants to tell her story in the press, the photographer asks if the family couldn’t look more tragic. Eunice refuses, and the family beams out their smiles next to the story of their father’s disappearance.

Then the film shifts forward another 18 years, as we find the elderly and now-silent Eunice (played by Montenegro), is a woman with dementia, briefly captivated by the flickering image of her late husband on a television screen. The family she held together so tenaciously has survived and prevailed, a new generation of grandchildren, a new crowded tables and the large busy family, bring the film full circle.

Whatever else it is, I’m Still Here is a scintillating collaboration between director and star, exploring the potency of emotional restraint. Torres’ Eunice sustains a fascinating doublemindedness, the outer calm revealing wisps of the emotional volcano inside.

Only once in the film does Eunice lose it, exploding at the stone-faced men in a car who are always parked outside her home. Then she pulls herself together, focusing on her mission for the next few decades. Discipline and devotion are her weapons against the legions of shadowy men with their guns, torture cells, and enemy’s lists.

I’m Still Here. Directed by Walter Salles. Written by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Starring Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, and Fernanda Montenegro. In theatres January 31 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, and in other cities throughout the winter.