Sometimes, the course of a life changes suddenly and emphatically with an event so final and unequivocal that it shifts the very world on its axis. On other occasions that change, or at least the understanding of that change, comes gradually, with the enormity of the situation obscured by the natural human propensity to hope for a happy outcome. For Eunice Paiva – the phenomenal Fernanda Torres – in Brazilian director Walter Salles’s superb, factually based Portuguese-language drama I’m Still Here, both are true.
When we first meet Eunice, life with her husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman and civil engineer, and their five children in a beachfront house in 1970 Rio de Janeiro, is full of friends and laughter; books and art; cigars, whisky and celebration. The flexing muscle of Brazil’s military dictatorship is background noise – the helicopter blades carving up the sky as the kids play beach volleyball; the rumble of a convoy of armoured vehicles on the seafront – that can be tuned out. It feels removed from the liberal intellectual social whirl of the Paiva household.
Then one afternoon, men with guns and sour faces arrive at the door. They’ve come, they say, to take Rubens to make a statement. Who they are and where he has been removed to remain a mystery. Eunice and her 15-year-old daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are also questioned. Eliana, although Eunice doesn’t know it, is released after 24 hours. Eunice, meanwhile, is kept in a filthy cell and subjected to repeated interrogations over 12 days. It’s the kind of trauma that scars a person’s psyche, but Eunice, for the sake of her kids and her own sanity, puts on a brave face and one of her many immaculately chic trouser suits and campaigns for Rubens’ safe return.
The first and longest chapter of this involving saga observes an unwittingly sheltered woman slowly coming to terms with the fact that the world has changed for ever, and so must she. The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity. She is deservedly Oscar-nominated for best actress. I’m Still Here is also in contention for best picture and best international feature film, and following the Emilia Pérez debacle it’s the one to beat in this last category.
His first Brazil-set feature since Linha de Passe in 2008, it’s a personal project for Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries; Central Station). As a child in Rio, he was close friends with the Paiva children – part of the constant tide of visitors who flowed through the always-open doors of the airy, friendly house on the beach. I’m Still Here is based on a memoir by Eunice’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who co-wrote the screenplay with Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega; the considerable Paiva archive of photos and home videos was an invaluable resource. In this film about the resilience of family, there’s also a personal connection for lead actor Torres: her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated 26 years ago for an Oscar for her performance in Central Station, appears in this film in a brief but devastating coda, playing Eunice as an older woman.
Meticulous in its period detail, I’m Still Here unfolds in a vividly evoked early 1970s Rio, with two later chapters set in 1996 and 2014. Far-reaching in its themes, the picture represents Salles at his absolute best. It looks sublime: the director chose to shoot on various film stocks, with grainy, skittish Super-16 capturing the energy and excitement of being a teenager running riot on the streets of Rio, and 35mm bringing a pleasing, lived-in texture to the domestic scenes. A terrific soundtrack balances the irreverent energy of Brazilian Tropicália artists such as Tom Zé and Caetano Veloso against a pensive, brooding score by Warren Ellis.
Among the film’s many exquisitely realised scenes, several stand out. One comes immediately after Eunice has heard from an associate of her husband the unconfirmed rumour of Rubens’ death. She has promised to take the children for ice-cream and that’s what she does, wrapping them in a protective layer of normalcy. But she scans the room in anguish, each laughing family sharing sundaes a choking reminder of the small, shared marital joys stolen from her.
Another is when Eunice decides to relocate the family to São Paulo to go back to college (in real life, she went on to become a human rights lawyer). As the last of their possessions are loaded into the car, the youngest of the Paiva children, Babiu (Cora Mora), sits on the doorstep, her face a mask of grief, leaning towards the now empty rooms as though drawn by the magnetic pull of happier times. It’s in this moment, we later learn, that the Babiu “buried” her father, realising then that he wasn’t coming home. I have watched I’m Still Here three times, and this achingly sad single shot has broken me every time.
• In UK and Irish cinemas
