The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised. This is a kind of mother-courage true story: the case of Eunice Paiva, a Brazilian woman who had to keep her family together and shield her five children from despair when her activist husband Rubens was brutally “disappeared” in 1971 by the military dictatorship. They refused even to admit he had been arrested, or later officially admit his death, in a state-sanctioned act of cruelty which was only finally acknowledged in the mid-90s after decades of campaigning, when the government issued a formal death certificate.
I’m Still Here is a drama which intelligently seeks to intuit the courageously maintained calm that Eunice imposes on herself and the children when the thuggish secret police arrive. Torres is effectively the still centre of a heartfelt but also somehow numbed and sometimes even strangely placid story. The film shows Eunice’s instinctive sense that overt outrage would be interpreted as leftist defiance and guilt. But it also shows her in some sense going into denial, rejecting the horror which is too much to process – even more horrifying as she herself is briefly taken into custody along with one of her children and tortured. She appears to be wordlessly telling everyone: just stay level, try to fabricate some normality at home, and soon it will all be over, and Rubens will return.
As their certainty that Rubens is alive sadly leaks away, the family move from Rio to São Paulo and a flashforward takes us to the bitter, compromised victory of them receiving the death certificate 25 years later. We also see Eunice’s new prominence as a human-rights campaigner for Indigenous peoples, though without showing us the passion and radicalised personal awakening that lay behind this new vocation.
For me, the film – in its procedural loyalty to Eunice’s own self-control – overlooks the horror and anger that must surely be somewhere in this story, too. When Eunice’s daughter arrives home from a trip away in London, she is disturbed by her mother’s weirdly dissociated blankness as she strains to keep it together. “Mom, are you OK?” she asks, which is a question that the audience might want to ask of the film. Eunice never cries.
We get some sentences over the final credits telling us briefly on what date Rubens was murdered, and also the date on which four security officers were finally charged but not convicted; it is retroactively disconcerting. There is a world of drama and outrage in those brief, bald statements, but it never really arrives in the preceding film. Yet, this might well be precisely the experiences of the families of the “disappeared”, their emotional responses stunted and amputated by the state. It’s a very intelligent performance from Torres.
• I’m Still Here is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 February, and in Australian cinemas from 27 February.
