Walter Salles‘ deeply poignant “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian director’s return to his homeland and to the filmmaking form that yielded his Oscar-nominated “Central Station,” begins where maybe every movie set in Rio de Janeiro should: at the beach. A stray dog disturbs a game of volleyball. Girls dab Coca-cola onto their skin as tanning lotion. Little kids play football and flirty teens trade gossip about pop stars and boys they like. In the sparkling water, Eunice Paiva (a stunning turn from Salles regular Fernanda Torres) floats on her back, squinting against the sun. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. But there is a helicopter.
It is Christmastime in 1970 and Brazil is six years deep into the military dictatorship that would last for another 15. But on a day like this, amongst people like the Paiva family – Eunice, her engineer husband Rubens (Selton Mello) their five volleyball-playing, Coke-tanning, dog-adopting children and their live-in housekeeper Zeze (Pri Helena) — its presence is mostly felt only in radio reports of kidnapped diplomats and in the occasional army convoy that trundles down the road separating the beach from their large, airy home.
As much as “I’m Still Here” is the story of this family and the devastating state-sanctioned crime that was inflicted upon them, it is the story of this lovely house (one where Salles himself, who has known the real Paiva family since the 1960s, spent a lot of time as an adolescent). It is a place thrown open to the world, to guests and friends and foosball, and conversations about politics and music and art, that gradually falls silent and fearful, is emptied of company, and finally, of the family itself. One day, after serious-faced men in black leather jackets have taken Rubens away “for questioning,” never to return, and after she herself has endured many days in a filthy detention cell being quizzed on resistance activities she knows nothing about, Eunice asks Zeze to find the key for their never-before-locked front gate, and that simple gesture feels like the end of an epoch.
Having the fate of this well-appointed, upper-middle-class house evoke that of an increasingly oppressed Brazil might seem like a strained metaphor, but Salles’ deeply invested filmmaking is remarkable in its grace and naturalism. In vintage, spongy colors, interspersed with home movies shot by the eldest, movie-and-music-mad daughter, Veroca (Valnetina Herszage) on a handheld Super 8 camera, DP Adrian Teijido’s gorgeously tactile photography gives the whole film the texture of a story not being told but remembered. As soundtracked to Gilberto Gil sambas and Caetano Veloso hits, and elsewhere to Warren Ellis’ lovely piano and strings score, there’s a melancholy in even the brightest moments of family togetherness. And it’s not because of a sense of impending doom, but because these scenes play like memories, and however happy, memories are always on some level sad.
Perhaps if the focus was solely on the loss of Rubens — a beloved father and husband who was moved by his conscience to help the opponents of the regime in secret — the hue of nostalgia that drenches the movie would become maudlin. But Salles’ real focus (and that of the book by Rubens’ son Marcelo on which the film is based) is resilience, especially as demonstrated by Eunice, who is entirely embodied in Torres’ superb performance. The kind of woman who is effortlessly elegant in every outfit, and whose soufflés never stick to the pan, after her husband’s abduction and her own terrifying ordeal, Eunice’s resourcefulness in raising her children and starting anew despite her enormous grief and the cruel denial of her husband’s fate by the authorities, become the backbone of a story of survivorship and quiet courage.
Classical in form but radical in empathy, “I’m Still Here” arguably does not need the follow-up sections — one set in 1996 and the other in 2014 — that somewhat alter the emotional rhythm. But on the other hand, these characters are so vivid that we don’t want to leave them either, and Eunice’s campaign for the official recognition of her husband’s forced disappearance was a process that took many years to bear fruit. Not only that, but the 2014 epilogue allows us a glimpse of Salles’ “Central Station” star and Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, in a brief role as the older Eunice.
And perhaps most crucially, having the film end with Eunice’s now even more extended clan gathered once again in an airy garden for a smiling family photograph, turns it into a cautionary tale, addressed to those forces in Brazil and beyond, who would seek a return to repression and rule by fear. The national spirit you seek to subdue will outlast you. The people you try to oppress will live to see you reviled and rejected by history, while those who resist will have songs and stories written about them. They will inspire music and art in celebration of their lives and will have movies as heartsore and beautiful as “I’m Still Here” made in their honor.
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