Political statements don’t come much stronger than this one.
Nor as authentic.
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| Rubens (Selton Mello) and his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) enjoy a playful moment with their two youngest children, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) and Maria (Cora Mora), on the beach in front of their home. |
The setting is Rio de Janeiro, six years into the 21-year military dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president in 1964. Eunice (Fernanda Torres), her husband Rubens (Selton Mello) and their five children — Vera (Valentina Herszage), Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), Nalu (Barbara Luz), Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) and Maria (Cora Mora) — live comfortably in a welcoming beachside home. Their doors and windows are always open, beckoning friends and neighbors.
Beloved live-in housekeeper Zeze (Pri Helena) may as well be a family member.
Salles spends considerable time on this idyllic introduction. The family often is at the beach, Marcelo kicking a soccer ball with friends, while his sisters play volleyball. Eunice floats contentedly in the calm ocean waters. Meals are cheerfully boisterous, often with visitors. Marcelo finds an adorable stray dog on the beach; Rubens hasn’t the heart to refuse his son’s entreaty to adopt it.
The warmth, tenderness and conviviality displayed in these early scenes is the best argument I’ve yet seen for establishing an Academy Awards category for casting directors. In this case, Leticia Naveira has assembled an amazing ensemble of actors; the children, in particular, display the closely knit camaraderie and love we’d expect from an actual family. Interactions with their parents, and peers and other adults, are equally persuasive.
These establishing scenes are an intoxicating blend of Adrian Teijido’s gorgeous 35mm cinematography — as luxurious as the beachside setting — and amateur footage shot by Vera, with her new Super 8 camera
If all of this looks and feels unexpectedly intimate, it arrives honestly. Salles has long known the Paiva family; he spent part of his adolescence in the house that becomes central to this film. Directors often regard certain projects as a “labor of love,” and that’s absolutely, clearly the case here.
Rubens, an engineer and former congressman, fled the country for six years following the coup. Newly returned, he keeps busy by designing a new country house for his family, and helping other Brazilian expatriates. It gradually becomes clear that this lifestyle is a deliberate act of silent rebellion: defiant happiness in the face of an increasingly threatening military presence, evidenced by convoys of soldier that occasionally drive along the beach.
The family’s taste is progressive, mirroring the 1960s ideals of the American counter-culture: new music by Caetano Veloso, Cal Costa and Gilberto Gil; the rising Cinema Novo movement.
But ill winds are stirring, which become impossible to ignore. Vera and several friends are stopped one evening, at a military checkpoint, and harassed by soldiers. A longtime friend, who runs a local bookstore, decides to take his family to England. Recognizing that the outspoken, college-bound Vera is likely to become a target, Rubens and Eunice send her with them, to study in London.
The remaining family members intently follow televised news reports of the dictatorship’s efforts to quash the activities of left-wing revolutionaries. The year concludes as one such group kidnaps the Swiss ambassador, finally freeing him on January 16, 1971, after the Brazilian government sends 70 political prisoners to asylum in Chile.
Four days later, the Paiva home is invaded by half a dozen men — soldiers or plainclothes police officers, we don’t know which — who insist that Rubens accompany them, ostensibly to give testimony on some criminal case. Several men remain behind, with Eunice and the children.
The men don’t do anything overt ... but they’re scary. They remain for days, in shifts. Eunice, refusing to be intimidated, treats them cordially ... and repeatedly asks when her husband will return home: a question that brings only a silent stare.
Then she and Eliana are removed from home, forced to wear black hoods, and taken to a secret prison. Whatever lingers of the first act’s cheerful family atmosphere vanishes in a throat-clutching heartbeat. Eunice is separated from her daughter, locked into a cell, and — over the course of 12 days — repeatedly interrogated by implacable men who expect her to identify supposed political dissidents from a huge “mug book” of black-and-white photographs.
Whether she actually recognizes anybody is open to debate; Torres’ resolute, grim expression reveals nothing.
At one point — totally chilling — she’s horrified to see her daughter’s picture, among all the others.
Eunice is relieved to learn, from one of her captors, that Eliana was sent home after just one day. When Eunice finally is released, that same individual quietly wants her to know that he “does not approve.”
(Like that matters?)
Her first act, upon returning home, is heartbreaking: a shower, that Salles allows to play out at length, and in detail.
The story then follows Eunice’s tenacious determination to endure, maintaining a brave front for the sake of the children, while also re-inventing herself in order to survive, and obtain answers. Everything is against her; the family is under constant surveillance by men in cars parked outside their home, and she’s unable to access their bank accounts without her husband endorsing transactions (a thoroughly infuriating result of Brazilian women, at that time, being legally subordinate to their husbands).
The depth and complexity of Torres’ shattering performance — as events slowly, grindingly play out — are sublime. Eunice pivots, often in an eye-blink, from caring parent — whenever one of the younger children becomes frightened, or needs comfort — to dogged researcher, investigator and late-entry university student, in pursuit of a law degree.
Torres absolutely deserves to win the Academy Award.
Mello’s performance is equally nuanced. Rubens is the pluperfect father, devoted to his wife and children, and always displaying a friendly smile. Mello makes him amiable and kind, his eyes forever sparkling. Watching him being taken away, still displaying false cheer, hits us just as painfully as the family members who watch him go.
To call this film powerful is insufficient; it’s also heart-in-mouth riveting, unsettling and — entirely by accident — disturbingly prophetic. Salles reveals, in his press notes, that this project was conceived six years ago, and initially intended as a means of illuminating a dark portion of Brazil’s past. Then Jair Bolsonaro came into power in 2019, and — two years later, among many other heinous acts — awarded medals of honor to torturers from the coup years. (Does this sound familiar?)
Suddenly, I’m Still Here became a grim reminder that things can become bad again. Its Brazilian release, in early November, was followed two weeks later by the revelation that Bolsonaro — who lost the 2022 election — had planned a military coup that would kill newly elected president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his vice president, and a Supreme Court Justice.
Its debut today, in theaters across the United States, should be an equally timely wake-up call.
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