Cinema Without Borders: I’m Still Here - Trial by fire
The crux of Brazilian icon Walter Salles’ new film I’m Still Here lies in the vivid, expressive face of its lead actress Fernanda Torres. It’s a face that you can’t take your eyes off, a face that tells the story subtly, soulfully and strongly. Torres encapsulates the many thoughts, meanings and motifs underlying the film in her resolute persona, and propels its narrative by her powerful presence. Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 book Ainda Estou Aqui, it’s a real-life account of the horrors faced by his family, when he was a child, at the hands of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the early 70s. Torres plays Marcelo’s mother Eunice Paiva, who finds life for herself in Rio, and for her five kids, upended suddenly with the unexplained summoning of her husband Rubens Paiva (Selton Melli) for a deposition and his subsequent disappearance. Has it got to do with the fact that he has been a former Brazilian Labour Party congressman?
Recently platformed as one of the Gala Screenings at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, it has been selected as the Brazilian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. I’m Still Here had its world premiere in Venice earlier in September where it won the best screenplay award. Salles takes to classic, linear storytelling making us travel through three eras in the lives of the Paivas, and of Brazil—70s, late 90s and 2014. An epic sweep which takes us to the heart of an atrocity, the fight of Eunice to get justice for her husband, kids and her own self and the eventual closure that still isn’t quite one.
With the focus on the family, Salles sensitively harnesses emotions to underscore a political point, the personal intertwining compellingly with the political. There are kidnappings, on the one hand, and harassment and arrests of the innocents on the other. In the midst of the turmoil and chaos outside, he casts a humane gaze on his characters and their reality at home and imbues the film with warmth and humanism. The Paiva house is filled with people, food, souffle and wine, music and dance, love and laughter. In the light of the delightful moments of familial togetherness and joy that he lays out at the start of the film, the recklessness and fecklessness of tyranny that we get to witness later magnifies several times over. What makes it even more disturbing is that Salles’ portrayal of the essential torment is not in your face, the violence is implicit. No blood might spill on the screen but the reality of detentions, incarceration and forced disappearances, of dead bodies dropped off from helicopters and mass graves is blood-curdling nonetheless.
As mentioned earlier, Torres is the compelling carrier of the film’s message. The film is all about her as a courageous and caring mother and also about an individual coming on her own as a lawyer and human rights activist. There’s something intuitive in the way her on-screen Eunice anticipates the upcoming doom and gloom in the unease and unrest all around. There’s stoicism in the acceptance of the uncomfortable truth about her husband and still carrying on with ice cream dinners and life in general. In a masterstroke of casting Salles makes Torres’ own mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro play the older Eunice. The entire ensemble of actors is well-tuned with each other and gives the feel of a real close-knit family.
The Brazil of the 70s, late 90s and 2014—its sights and sounds—are wonderfully realised right down to the grainy textures of images. It’s the evocation of the feel of the 70s Rio which is the key—a place that’s uneasy in its own skin. The camera remains a vital presence throughout in the hands of the elder daughter of the family, as she goes about capturing the changing Rio, a metaphor for being a recorder of the tumultuous times and also a repository of individual, personal memories. The camera and Salles’ film, in turn, are cautionary reminders about the persistence of persecution the world over. More so it’s about the lack of follow-through when it comes to seeking justice, the inability to find a legal recourse which makes emotional closures impossible. A film of its times and timeless!
