When we meet the Paiva family in “I’m Still Here,” now in limited release and a compelling reason to leave your sofa for a few hours, they’re living in a state of uncertain bliss, in a country Which recently took a brutal turn into military dictatorship.
It is 1970 in Brazil. The Pavazes – mother, father, children, always visiting with friends to their beach-adjacent house in Rio de Janeiro – think about their comfortable, sunny, airy life. He has drawn up plans for a new house. The eldest child is going to London. The affable, apparently carefree father, Rubens, played by Selton Mello, is an engineer. He was also a leftist Congressman who fled the country after the 1964 military coup, joining his family when he felt things had calmed down.
they did not have. The story of “I’m Still Here”, based on a memoir by Marcelo Paiva, may have been inspired by Rubens’ sudden disappearance. But director Walter Sells’s sensitive, beautifully acted docudrama follows Eunice, a woman stuck in limbo, not knowing whether her husband is alive or dead, who seeks to maintain family order and a sense of security in a country dealing with perceived enemies of the state. Determined to keep. In a cruel, deadly manner.
Much of “I’m Still Here” is presented in ways that may be new and refreshing to American audiences accustomed to more explicit wickedness and ferocity in story and fantasy. But this is a story of waiting and living when the unknown is the only thing known. The film belongs to Eunice, portrayed with regal but human-level bravery by the brilliant and Oscar-nominated Fernanda Torres. Sayles’ film also received nominations this week for Best International Film and, importantly, Best Picture.
Sayles is a poet of vehicular movement, which you certainly get from his adaptations of “The Motorcycle Diaries” and “On the Road.” Images of the Paiva children’s freewheeling daytrips are captured through Super 8 home-movie footage of elder daughter Vera.
The director carefully introduces the real, true dangers the family is about to face: a whispered conversation here, a checkpoint with hopping, armed policemen there. And then father left. The surviving family is met and then, for an extremely absurd series of days and days, shared their home with extremely mysterious agents of the government.
These people’s ordeal, which includes a mysterious interrogation sequence sending Eunice and her teenage daughter with their heads wrapped in black sackcloth to the same place where Rubens had recently been seen. “I’m Still Here” centers its scope around family, but family is a highly social organism, and both parents and children have large, varied lives. Many of his friends and associates may know something, even if they are afraid to talk.
This gently charged atmosphere of everyday tension suggests that we need to enter this time and place, guided by a screen of first-rate performances.
Torres is one of those screen giants who has a very precise relationship with the camera, never pushing, always exploring the emotions expressed, even if they are being hidden, or kept under control, because one Is watching. A drunkard. Frightened child. A friend of the missing father. The big, explosive moments for Eunice, whom we follow for several decades (the great Fernanda Montenegro plays a role late in the film) are fewer and, as a result, completely authentic in Torres’ hands. He and Sayles collaborated on a work of high craft and confident pace, as well as a sincere dedication to a family and a subject that brings out the active spirit in anyone.
“I’m Still Here” – 3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA Rating: PG-13 (for thematic content, some strong language, drug use, smoking and brief nudity)
Running time: 2:18
How to watch: Now in limited theatrical release