Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is the true story of a left-wing political family in Brazil caught up in the dark days of the military dictatorship. It’s a riveting story with incredible character and period detail that deserves an Oscar this Sunday.
The new film by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station), Brazil’s most celebrated living director, I’m Still Here has finally arrived at a movie theater near me. The reason it’s playing in wide release is no doubt because it’s an Academy Award nominee, up for Best Picture, Best International Film, and Best Actress for Fernanda Torres. There’s a strong argument to be made that it ought to win them all.
A political drama based on the 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I’m Still Here is about a family fractured by the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. There was an attempt by right-wing groups in Brazil to boycott the film. But it’s turned out to be the highest-grossing film in that country since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the early 1970s, when the movie is initially set, former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) has returned home from political exile after the CIA-backed military overthrow of João Goulart’s left-wing government. We find Rubens working as a civil engineer and living with his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their five lively children in Rio de Janeiro.
Salles spends a lot of time exploring the dynamic of the family, which is an unusual one in that it seems to be a genuinely happy bunch. The Paivas are affluent, which is a great help, and live in a marvelously vibrant house on the beach in Rio. The jovial Rubens and vivacious Eunice host dinners and parties in a warm circle of friends, and spend lots of time with their kids, who are wonderfully cast and directed to convey their strong individual personalities. There’s oldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage), for example, gorgeous and fiercely outspoken. There’s Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), emotionally sensitive and the first to fully realize the disaster that’s overtaken the family.
And there’s Marcelo, bright and engaged, played by Guilherme Silveira, a boy who Salles spotted playing in the street who struck the director as having the alert intelligence needed to play the character. This casting of nonprofessional actors is reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica’s casting of another boy found in the street, the wonderful Enzo Staiola, who had the natural sensitivity and comedic gifts to play the second lead in Bicycle Thieves (1948).
Salles spends considerable time establishing the family dynamic in part because he’s representing people he knew personally. When he was a young teenager, the middle Paiva daughter, Nalu, was part of his circle of friends, and as a result he was a frequent visitor to their marvelous household, which Salles calls “that luminous place.” He admired the family’s scintillating social life, with people of remarkable accomplishments from all generations and widely diverse backgrounds gathering to eat, drink, talk, discourse freely on politics, listen to records, and dance. (And they all dance very well in the film, including the heavyset Rubens — this is Brazil, after all.)
Salles made an immense effort to recreate the household he so fondly remembered, locating a house architecturally similar to the real Paiva home, even built by the same architect. He went as far as having the actors live and cook and socialize in the house, to the point that when the real Marcelo Rubens Paiva stopped by the set, he said the house even smelled like his old family home.
But it’s clear from the beginning of the film that for all the joie de vivre, there’s a long shadow cast over these apparently favored lives. Salles represents it in the opening scene, with Eunice swimming some distance out into the ocean to float on her back in an interval of peace that is disturbed by the black military helicopter that roars overhead. Soon daughter Veroca, returning from a screening of the 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni movie Blow-Up, gets stopped at a military checkpoint where her friends are roughed up in bizarrely harsh streetside interrogations.
With Brazil a political powder keg, friends of the Paivas are emigrating to London and urge them to come too. But Rubens and Eunice decide the situation’s not at the crisis point —yet. However, they agree to send Veroca to London along with their friends, specifically to steer her away from her tendency toward political involvement in Brazil. Meanwhile, Rubens is clearly engaged in some sort of clandestine political activity, with mysterious phone calls and packages coming and going, all kept secret from Eunice and the children. As he mutters to his friend, “You can’t just do nothing . . .”
But it still comes as a shock to the audience when the hammer finally falls. Unidentified men in ordinary street clothes arrive at the house and take Rubens away to “answer some questions.” Rubens goes, turning to look back at the house and smile bravely at Eunice before he’s driven away. But afterward, several of the men stay in the house and draw the curtains, allowing no one to leave. Days go by, with the men bizarrely living in the house, sharing the family meals from stiffly isolated places in the home, refusing Eunice’s attempts to engage them in conversation.
Then suddenly Eunice and Eliana are taken away as well, hooded and driven to an unknown site where they’re separated and imprisoned. Eunice is photographed, interrogated, and urged to identify people she knows from a binder of pictures. As the days pass, she’s questioned repeatedly and menacingly told to go back to her cell and “change your attitude.” She sees a photo of Rubens in the binder. And her own.
Finally, after twelve days that Eunice tracks by scratching on the wall, she’s released and goes home to a sleeping houseful of children. Eliana is already home, having been released after twenty-four hours. Eunice takes her first shower in nearly two weeks.
And Eunice begins the process of trying to find out what’s happened to Rubens, which will drive her for the rest of the film. She also confronts harsh economic realities as she’s barred any access to Rubens’s bank accounts, runs out of funds, loses the family’s beloved house, and is forced to relocate everyone to São Paulo, where grandparents will take them in. The grainy but glowing Super 8 shots of the house, recorded by Veroca as they drive away from it forever, are so poignant that they would make a powerful ending to the film.
But that’s not the end of the film, and for many, it’s hard not to experience the two extended epilogues as anticlimactic. But Salles opts to follow Eunice’s remarkable narrative from a kind of ideal housewife to a formidable figure at the top of her profession. Catching up with her twenty-five years later, she’s earned her law degree and become a widely recognized indigenous land rights expert.
Then there’s another leap ahead to 2014, when Eunice, now truly elderly and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, is a silent, wheelchair-bound presence at a Paiva family gathering. Fernanda Torres’s own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in Salles’s Central Station, plays the eighty-five-year-old Eunice.
Clearly the family has had a softer landing than the majority of the persecuted would have had, cushioned by access to money and resources from somewhere, presumably family. Probably the uneasiest aspect of the film is this unexplored class issue. It’s a blind spot that’s most disturbing when it comes to the issue of the Paiva family’s relationship to their housekeeper Zezé (Pri Helena). Zezé is so stalwart that she uses money Eunice gives her to replace her fraying apron to buy groceries for the family when funds run low. But soon Zezé is paid off and let go, and we see her glumly sitting on her bed surrounded by her packed bags before she disappears from the narrative. But there’s no scene in which any family member sees her off, this woman who was presumably part of their lives for many years.
It’s odd. Is Salles pointing out a lack of cross-class affection here, or is it his own blind spot we’re witnessing? After all, Salles comes from extreme wealth and privilege and is himself a billionaire — the third-richest filmmaker in the world, in fact, behind Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. His father was a prominent banker, the founder of Unibanco, who was also a former Brazilian ambassador to the United States. The merger of Itaú Unibanco is now the largest banking concern in South America.
It seems to be no accident that Salles’s most political film before this one, The Motorcycle Diaries, is another account of the radicalization of an affluent person — in that case, a wealthy young Argentinian medical student named Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and a fateful motorcycle trip across South America with his biochemist friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna).
It’s an uneasy subject on the Left, the wealthy converts to class struggle on the side of labor and liberation. How many revolutionary figures have been drawn from the upper classes? Besides Guevara, just off the top of my head, there’s Countess Markievicz, a leader in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 and a commanding political presence in the fight against British rule who ended her life poor, dying in a public ward, having spent her fortune in the struggle for Irish independence.
Director Luchino Visconti, who made the great semidocumentary pro-union masterpiece La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) and became a defining figure in the intensely leftist film movement known as Italian neorealism, was for many crucial years a dedicated communist. He was also a Milanese nobleman, the son of a landed duke, with the title of Count of Lonate Pozzolo. Visconti risked his life supporting the anti-fascist resistance during World War II and barely escaped execution by the Nazis.
But no doubt you can think of your own examples.
For all its warmth and brilliance and valuable testimony to the horrors of the Brazilian military dictatorship, I’m Still Here leaves this aspect totally unexamined. Clearly for Brazilian audiences, the ongoing political volatility there makes the film seem all too relevant. And our own political precarity in the United States makes I’m Still Here positively haunting.
Needless to say, I recommend it.