Walter Salles' international success in 1998, Central Stationearned an Oscar nomination for the magnificent Fernanda Montenegro. Now in her 90s, the actress shows up toward the end of the director's first feature in her native Brazil in 16 years, the shocking I'm still here (Also Here Is Here), in a role that requires her to speak only through her expressive eyes. What makes the connection even more touching is that she appears as the elderly and infirm version of the protagonist, a woman of quiet strength and resilience played by Montenegro's daughter, Fernanda Torres, with extraordinary grace and dignity in the face of emotional suffering.
Many powerful films have been made about the 21 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, from 1964 to 1985, as well as similar oppressive regimes in neighboring South American countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The human rights violations of systematic torture, murder, and enforced disappearances are an open wound in the psyche of those nations, for which cinema has often served as a vehicle for collective memory.
I'm still here
The conclusion
Gone but not silenced.
Place: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Launch: Fernanda Torres, Fernanda Montenegro, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kozovski, Maria Manoella, Marjorie Estiano
Director: Walter Salles
Screenwriters: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, based on the book Also Here Is Hereby Marcelo Rubens Paiva
2 hours and 17 minutes
It is not often, however, that the spirit of protest against the horrors of junta rule is seen through such an intimate lens as I'm still hereThis aspect is deepened by the film's ongoing evidence of Salles' personal investment in the true history of the Paiva family after patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman, was taken from his Rio de Janeiro home in 1971, ostensibly to give a deposition, and was never seen or heard from again.
Salles met the family in the late 1960s and spent a significant part of his youth in their home, which he considers fundamental to his cultural and political development. This explains the relentless vitality of the early scenes, as the five Paiva brothers run back and forth between the house and the beach, and an extended family of friends of all ages seems to constantly drop by to drink, eat, listen to music and chat animatedly.
There are sweet moments thrown in, like two sisters dancing and singing together to the Serge Gainsbourg-Jane Birkin classic “Je t'aime … moi non plus,” without understanding the words. Just watching one of the younger children, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), sweet-talks his way into holding a stray dog they found on the beach conveys the warmth, spontaneity and affectionate cheekiness of the Paiva household dynamic. The young actors playing the children are all disarmingly natural and charming.
The first abrupt intrusion into the family’s bubble of closeness and comfort occurs when eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) goes out with a group of friends and their car is stopped at a checkpoint in a tunnel. It’s a disturbing scene in which we see teenagers, just minutes before out and about, sharing a joint and laughing, being ordered, at gunpoint, to stand against a wall while military officers interrogate them, searching their faces for any resemblance to the “murderous terrorists” they want to catch.
A hushed telephone conversation or a private exchange with a friend suggests Rubens’ involvement in something that must be kept secret. But Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega’s screenplay, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book, withholds those details until long after Rubens is taken into custody. This puts us in the same position as his wife and children, wondering what their father might have done to put him in the regime’s crosshairs.
The chill of uncertainty is hardest for Rubens' wife, Eunice (Torres), who does her best to hide what's happening from the little ones. But having strangers with guns in the house and a car parked across the street to keep a constant eye on them is hard to explain, and the older siblings know something is wrong.
The situation escalates when Eunice is dragged away for questioning. With Vera in London with family friends, the second eldest, fifteen-year-old Eliana (Luiza Kozovski), is forced to accompany her mother, with bags over her head to prevent them from knowing where they are being taken.
The interrogation scenes, set in a dark building with prison cells, are harrowing. Eunice is sequestered for 12 days. Denied access to the family lawyer, she is kept completely in the dark about what is happening to her daughter and is unable to find out where her husband is being held. She is forced again and again to identify people in the photo files as possible insurgents, but apart from her husband, she recognizes only one woman who teaches at her daughter's school. Her isolation and fear are compounded by the constant screams of tortured people coming through the walls.
There are many moments of raw tenderness after Eunice's release, particularly when one of her daughters watches from the bathroom door, with an expression of mingled pain and terror, as her mother washes off 12 days of filth.
With the government refusing to even acknowledge that her husband has been arrested, Eunice continues to search for information, talking to Rubens' friends who tell her that the army is “shooting blind,” chasing people at random based on next to nothing concrete. Unable to make bank withdrawals without her husband's signature, she struggles to keep up with her expenses. At the same time, she begins to study the family lawyer's file, foreshadowing her eventual decision to move with her five children to São Paulo and return to college.
The main thrust of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book is essentially his mother’s silent heroism, first when she takes on the responsibility of keeping the family together and protected, hiding her grief when the inevitable happens, and then when she earns a law degree at 48 and becomes active in a variety of causes. This includes pushing for full recognition by the authorities of disappeared people like Rubens after democracy returns to the country.
Salles’s heartfelt film leaps forward 25 years and then nearly 20 more, allowing us to absorb Eunice’s reinvention not in grand protest speeches but simply in her dedication to the work of keeping memories alive and not letting the abuses of the past be swept away.
Perhaps the film’s most beautifully observed narrative arc is the gradual rebuilding of the family. As the children grow up, get married, and grandchildren arrive, they return to being a noisy, joyful clan, much like the one depicted in the lighthearted scenes at the beginning. Even the simple process of sorting through boxes of family photos is seen as a loving act of reclamation in a final stretch that will make many viewers cry.
Torres (one of the stars of Salles' fantastic first film, Foreign landco-directed with Daniela Thomas) is a model of eloquent restraint, showing Eunice's private grief and her necessary fortitude with the subtlest of means. Only once during the film does she raise her voice in anger after a sad event, banging on the windows of the parked car that guards the house in Rio and yelling at the two impassive-faced men inside.
The final scenes where Montenegro comes into her own are bittersweet, as Eunice has become nonverbal and uses a wheelchair, in steep decline from Alzheimer's. The emotion is almost overwhelming as we watch her bend delicately, her eyes light up and a hint of a smile form, when Rubens's photograph appears on a TV program about resistance heroes.
The film is magnificent. Adrian Teijido's agile cinematography uses 35mm with great grain to evoke the 1970s, and Super 8mm home movies shot during that decade provide nice punctuation. The film's other key asset is Warren Ellis's score, which starts off pensive and quietly eerie before shifting almost imperceptibly into a much more emotional vein with the rush of feeling that accompanies the time jumps forward.
While it could use a less generic international title that isn't also a well-known Stephen Sondheim song, I'm still here It is a gripping film, deeply moving, with a deep well of pathos. It is one of Salles's best.