The Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles developed I’m Still Here for seven years before it premiered as part of Venice’s Main Competition this year. That brings us closer to the time when a book of the same name was first published in Brazil: I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), the 2015 memoir of Marcelo Rubens Paiva. Marcelo is the son of Rubens Paiva, an ex-Congressman whose opposition to the Brazilian military dictatorship resulted in exile in 1964 until, in 1971, he was made to disappear. Salles, who knew the Paiva family personally, centers his film around that traumatic event as experienced by Eunice (Fernanda Torres), wife of Rubens and a mother of five.
In the film, Brazil’s military dictatorship is felt but kept at the periphery of the frame. As the opening shot shows Eunice swimming in the ocean, Rio’s blue skies are momentarily pierced by a helicopter flying over. Later, an army vehicle passes by. The police are hounding youngsters who travel in groups. All resistance has to be squashed or silenced––that’s how the regime operates––but in the center of the frame, bursting with song and color, there is the Paiva family. Without a hint of fear, parents and children live a happy life and their big home is more than just a social hub: it’s a place where every day feels like a celebration. Thus the first half of I’m Still Here presents––in a rather epic way, with lots of details and narrative detours––a perfect picture of a blissful family, often documented on Super 8 by the eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage).
Then, out of the blue, Rubens (Selton Mello) is called in for “questioning.” He never returns, sans explanation. A number of armed men take turns to watch the house, ensuring nobody goes in or out. A suffocating feeling grips I’m Still Here, and what follows is a middle act of slow-burning despair, striking at the core of a rotten system of abstracted mechanisms of control. The causes of such irredeemable personal loss are always faceless––that’s what keeps them in power. A few days later, officers take Eunice in for interrogation and imprison her in a cell with no windows for days on end. Salles knows what to do with these scenes: the quiet rage building up in his protagonist is already palpable. It is that prison stay and the subsequent lies spread by the government about Rubens’s release that, according to the film, make an activist out of the mother as the search for her husband becomes a quest for justice drawn over decades: 1970s, 1990s, and by the end of the film, mid-2010s when Eunice finally receives Rubens’ death certificate.
But still, in the film, Eunice remains first and foremost a mother. It would be a stretch to say the mother-as-nation metaphor truly works here: she’s decisively consumed with the state of her own family and often brushes off attempts to engage in a larger organized resistance. Not that this is a prerequisite or a necessity––the film is based on real people and their real lives––yet the way Salles sidelines these other, bigger attempts to disrupt the status quo certainly limit the scope of I’m Still Here’s political message.
Torres is stellar, even with such a hermetic character. Eunice is stoic, almost saintly in her devotion to family, the expressions of which never manage to elevate I’m Still Here from visual flatness, its surprisingly deep commitment to conventional shot continuity, and an overblown duration of 135 minutes. Suffering cannot be measured, neither familial nor national, but on this occasion Salles has somehow failed to find the right cinematic framework for this biopic storytelling. The film feels uncalibrated, but not in the free-flowing, depth-exploring, liberated kind of way.
Together with writers Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega (both of whom have co-written with another big Brazilian name, Karim Aïnouz), Salles makes sure to channel all the undying respect he has for victims of state and human-rights crimes, as a tribute even to the thousands and thousands of desaparecidos (disappeared) that have marked the country’s history in invisible blood. Who else to tell their story than those left behind? Perhaps it’s the case that something got lost between these two perspectives: the son’s first-person memoir and the film’s matriarchal perspective. Maybe if I’m Still Here was framed as Eunice’s life through the eyes of Marcelo, then most of the wide, idealizing brush strokes in this saintly portrait would prove much more permissible.
I’m Still Here premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.