I’m Still Here review
Director: Walter Salles
Writers: Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega
Stars: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello and Fernanda Montenegro
Running Time: 138 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
If there is an indulgence to Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, it’s an indulgence of an emotional kind. Salles channels such intense love and empathy towards his character’s, he simply cannot bear to part with them until he must. The result is a film that feels overlong, filled with one epilogue too many, but the traumatic journey of the Paiva family is insistently captivating, politically relevant and establishes one of strongest female leads I’ve seen.
“In a world of dictatorships, truth is an invisible currency.”
It's a true story, one director Walter Salles is personally connected to. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro, near the Paiva family home, and he knew them personally when father and ex-Congressman Rubens Paiva was arrested by Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971. Here Salles’ shows the Paiva’s large family as dreamily middle class – their beautiful home sits just astride a public beach and so much early time is spent in the company of Ruben (Selton Mello), his wife Fernanda (Eunice) and their five feisty and adorable children. They’re a proud family, a confident one, an often photographed one. Regularly they’ll snap a family picture on the beach or oldest daughter, Veroca, will film a family event in the jumpy, sepia tinged beauty of 8mm film.
The early moments are utopian. On the beach young daughter Nula, 13, rubs Coca-Cola on her skin to accelerate her tan. Her brother Marcelo finds a scrappy but irresistible puppy running free, and it seems all but fate that the family will keep it. Their evenings are spent in the throes of socialising, celebration and vibrant dinner table discussion. After Veroca is shaken up by armed officers at a road checkpoint, the family watch TV coverage of the 1970 kidnapping of the Swiss Ambassador by left-wing revolutionaries, an act of terror that emboldens tyrannical action from the right-wing government. We know the worst is yet to come.
When the military appear at the Pavia house, the heartbreaking aspect is how innocent the children are in their scant awareness of the political instability that surrounds them. Ruben is arrested but not before he kindly tells his family he’ll be “back in time for soufflé.” In Kafkaesque circumstances, he is taken without any utterance of his crime. Salles then forces us to experience the trauma of losing a father in near real-time in what ultimately becomes a devastating love letter to the strength of Eunice Paiva. Fernanda Torres is particularly stunning, lifting the heavy weight of communicating inner turmoil while presenting outer resilience. She stands tall, scene after scene, aware that her life is moving in a torrid direction but loath to show weakness in the face of political injustice. Instead she raises her kids and designs a life to keep them alive.
After she is herself arrested, it’s unforgettable to watch her return home and take a shower after 12 days of confinement and torture. Her body black with dirt, she scrubs it red-raw for no amount of effort seems enough to erase the measure of grime she’s had to endure. It’s a human detail I couldn’t help but feel physically, the act of scrubbing off pain and watching it disappear down a plughole.
In a world of dictatorships, truth is an invisible currency. For what pressure Eunice and her family and friends can put on the government, an answer to Ruben’s eventual fate is near-impossible to find, but the affect on his family is explicit. For Eunice the wound is permanent and it’s through the fate of her children where she gathers strength. Money dries up, but she doesn’t complain. The maids are asked to move on; she speaks to the bank unsuccessfully for help; finally, she tells her children she’ll be going back to school, because by then she knows her husband isn’t coming back. Survival isn’t enough for her – fighting is the only option. She enrolls in university and graduates as a Lawyer at 47 years young.
I’m Still Here is a reminder of how tricky it is to capture the richness of an extraordinary human life within a single feature. What starts as a true crime enactment, told almost day by day, slowly extends to the story of a complete life, of ageing and lost time. By the final-final coda, you’ll need to forgive Salles for indulging in the sheer gravity of Eunice Paiva’s achievements. The reality is she’s probably one of the most inspiring people in 20th century history, and yet until now most of us didn’t know she existed. This is Salles’ point. The joy of I’m Still Here is in experiencing the parallels of a complicated life: the result of hard work and the livelong bruise of uncontrollable trauma.
