‘I’m Still Here’

The opening of​ Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air.

There are breaks in this idyll. The heroine, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), whose husband will disappear before long, is swimming and sees military helicopters in the vicinity. One of her daughters, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), out on the town with her friends, is stopped, frisked and almost arrested by the police. Still, the film hangs on to its jollity for quite a while. We leave the beach – the Paiva family lives just across the road – to continue partying in a house. And then other houses. It’s all samba and bossa nova and the memories of rock stars. The memoir the movie is based on, which has the same title, carries an epigraph from David Bowie: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’

Well, perhaps this is not so comforting. A title card has told us the year – 1971 – and if we remember that a military dictatorship had been in power in the country since 1964, aided by the US, we may begin to feel a little baffled by all the rowdy joy. At this time, the government was already organising the disappearance of people it disapproved of. A further dark note is struck when a family planning to move to England for safety suggests that the Paivas should go with them. Veroca does so and stays for a year. In her letters she seems to know more about the political horrors in Brazil than those at home do. The other ominous thing is her father’s secretive activities – phone calls, envelopes exchanged with friends. He says it’s all to do with a house they are having built.

Some critics – Justin Chang and Peter Bradshaw, for example – feel the effervescence is an avoidance of reality. I agree that something seems off here. The carnival effect is definitely excessive, but Salles can hardly not know this or not want it. It is possible that he is thinking first of Brazilian audiences, who don’t need documentary reminders of the bad days. But I’m also inclined to imagine that he is presenting, for all audiences, a symptom more than an escape. An exaggeration, let’s say. If you’re trying not to be riled or panicked, it’s easy to overdo it, and the risk of overdoing it runs through the film, even in its bravest moments.

The ugly action starts very quietly, with a mixture of obscure menace and steady routine. A group of surly men appear at the family house and say their bosses need the father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), to answer some questions. He agrees to go with them, puts on a jacket and tie and leaves. He goes so willingly, I take it, because he wants to take the trouble away from his home and wife and children. He is never seen again.

The men don’t look like soldiers, they look like scruffy failed rock stars, but they are armed. Some of them stay to scare the family, sleeping on sofas and saying nothing. Then they arrest Eunice and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski). They know little about the prison where they are kept because they are made to wear hoods as they approach and enter the place. Eliana is not harmed and is released after a day. Eunice is regularly bullied and asked to identify friends on sheets of photographs. We presume the government is looking for information on active lefties. At the time, groups were kidnapping foreign ambassadors – first German, then Swiss – and asking as the price of their ransom the release of a specified number of political prisoners.

After thirteen days Eunice is allowed to go home and a life of waiting begins, initially for news of Rubens. At some point she learns through a journalist friend that Rubens was killed within days of his supposed questioning and that the president himself has mentioned in private that Rubens ‘died in combat’. But she doesn’t tell the children this for a long time. She does try, in all kinds of ways but with no success, to get some official acknowledgment of what happened. In his memoir Marcelo Rubens Paiva, a young child at this point in the story (and played by Guilherme Silveira in the film), says: ‘I don’t know the exact date on which she discovered the truth. That was when she stopped smiling for many years.’

A quarter of a century later Eunice receives, from a different, democratic government, a death certificate for Rubens. She and the children are at this point moved and curiously consoled. Life has been hard for Eunice. She couldn’t get access to certain bank accounts without Rubens’s signature. She sold their house and moved to Sao Paolo. The children grew up and no one else disappeared. Eventually she learned to smile again.

Fernanda Torres is amazing in this role. Graceful, kind, sympathetic from the start, she becomes a tireless pursuer of the hidden truth and a defender of trampled rights. She upsets the children with occasional tyrannical behaviour, but they support her even when they disagree with her. Torres conveys perfectly the sense that her character has become a quite different person while somehow remaining the old one.

We see the family, some played by different actors, in 1996. Marcelo is in a wheelchair, the result of an accident that the film mentions but says nothing further about. And I’m Still Here ends with another leap in time. It’s 2014, a year before Marcelo’s book is published. Eunice is now played by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’s mother and the heroine of Salles’s great film Central Station (1998). She has Alzheimer’s and sits staring and unmoving at a party. All the children are there. When Rubens is mentioned on the news, she seems to awaken. As the film closes a title card gives us a few scraps of information: Rubens was murdered on 21 or 22 January 1971; the killers were identified but never brought to court; Eunice became a lawyer at 48 (she was 41 when Rubens died).

In his book Marcelo reflects on his title, which has several meanings in the memoir and acquires another set in the movie. One chapter wonders, without finally answering the question, where ‘here’ is. The last chapter asks: ‘What am I doing here?’ And the book ends with a kind of pre-obituary for Eunice, who died in 2018, and the refusal of an obituary for Rubens: ‘Her pride was greater than her forgetfulness. She never felt sorry for herself. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. She never asked for help … I’m still here. Yes, you’re still here. My mother’s life has many acts. We will have one more. As for the death of my father, it has no end.’