Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here,” which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar earlier this year, calmly but powerfully observes a real-life personal struggle under a dictatorship in Brazil during the early 1970s. While never overlooking the grim and horrific aspects of that time, the movie stays focused on small but resonant human moments, and these intimate interactions become all the more poignant to us as the story eventually arrives at its two-part epilogue.
The movie begins with how things were mostly fine and pleasant for Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their five children in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during December 1970. The country has been under the military dictatorship for years since the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état, and Rubens and his family had to go through a brief period of exile due to his left-wing political career during that time. However, he is now back in his former civil professional career as focusing more on his family’s welfare, and the opening part of the movie phlegmatically depicts how he and his family happily go through another day of their mundane life.
Their country gets more volatile every day. Both Rubens and Eunice become more aware of the possible danger around their family and many others around them. When a close friend of theirs is about to move to London along with his wife for safety, they decide to have their eldest daughter move with that friend because they are afraid that she may get into any serious trouble at home. Eunice also comes to notice that her husband has been hiding something. He sometimes has a phone conversation in private, but Eunice does not ask too much, mostly occupied with taking care of the rest of their children.
One day, several guys come into Ruben and Eunice’s house, and Ruben is soon escorted away to somewhere to be interrogated for an unspecified reason. As those guys start to watch over her and her children at the house, Eunice begins to fear for the worst, but they do not tell her anything about why her husband was taken away, let alone when he will be back. She has no choice but to wait, while also protecting her children as best she can.
In the end, Eunice is also taken away along with her second eldest daughter, and what follows next is the darkest part of the story. Although the movie depicts Eunice and her daughter’s plight with considerable restraint, that is more than enough for us to be disturbed and chilled by the brutal political horror surrounding their circumstance.
Fortunately, Eunice and her daughter are eventually released, but her husband remains missing as before. While the government refuses to admit anything about his disappearance, Eunice decides to search for anything which may help her find her husband. Of course, it becomes more apparent to her that her husband will never return, and she and her children soon find themselves monitored by some suspicious people who may be government agents.
The screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, which is based on the memoir of the same name written by Marcelo Rubens Paiva (he is one of Eunice’s five children, by the way) chooses restraint. While there are a few melodramatic moments later in the story, the movie patiently follows how much Eunice struggles in one way or another as she searches for any information about her husband, and we come to admire her quiet but strong will and determination more, especially when she eventually makes a difficult but necessary decision for herself as well as her children later in the story.
Everything in the movie depends a lot on the beautifully nuanced performance of Fernanda Torres, who was deservedly nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress. Subtly conveying her character’s growing anxiety and desperation, Torres gradually takes center stage, and she is particularly heartbreaking as Eunice and her children must adjust themselves more to their irreversibly changed life after her husband’s disappearance.
Around Torres, several main cast members shine, bringing more human depth to the story. Selton Mello is well-cast as Eunice’s loving husband, and Guilherme Silveira, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, and Cora Mora hold their respective spots well as Eunice’s five children. Fernanda Montenegro, who is incidentally Torres’ mother and known to most of us mainly for her Oscar-nominated performance in Salles’ 1998 film “Central Station” (1998), makes a brief but effective appearance during the epilogue of the movie.
By the way, when I watched the movie for the first time early this year, I thought its two-part epilogue was a bit too long, and I would not have complained at all if it had stopped right after the first half of its epilogue. However, after revisiting the movie when it was recently released in South Korean theaters, I came to see the importance of the second half. While resonating a lot with the very title of the film, this also makes us reflect more on what numerous plain ordinary people including Eunice and her family had to endure and remember during that dark time in Brazil.
The movie touched a lot of the nerves in my parents, who had to go through the military dictatorship period in South Korea. After we watched the film together yesterday, they surely had something to tell me as people who still remember a lot about that grim period. Furthermore, our country could actually have gone back to that dark and terrible time because of the attempted coup d’état by that deplorable president around the end of last year, and that certainly makes the film feel all the closer to me and many other local audiences here.
“I’m Still Here” is an undeniably powerful human drama, which also feels quite relevant to us considering the ongoing rise of fascism and dictatorship around the world. Although he has been rather silent since 2012’s “On the Road,” Salles demonstrates here that he has not lost any of his talent, releasing his best work since “Central Station”.
