Director – Walter Salles – 2024 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 137m
****
When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st
1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.
With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel. Suddenly, they are all ordered out of the car at gunpoint, asked to show ID cards, and their faces checked against photos of known dissidents. This means Veroca arrives home late.
Rubens and his friends, meanwhile, believe that the various diplomats will be released unharmed in die course. And Reubens is often receiving or dropping off letters or packages at all times of the day.
Veroca is studying in London some time later when plain clothes men armed with handguns turn up at the family front door in Rio to take Rubens away for questioning. He remains commendably calm, negotiating with the men to let him change into a suit and tie before they lead his away. Later, the men also take away both Eunice and 15-year-old Eliana, driving terrifyingly fast if competently in their VW Beetle before putting hoods on mother and daughter. In a military compound, where the cries of people being tortured can occasionally be heard, Eunice is questioned in a room while her daughter waits outside. Eunice is required to look at pages of numbered mugshots and pick out any she recognises.
Initially, Eunice names no names and is warned she needs to change her attitude. On a subsequent re-look, she picks out one of her children’s teachers Martha (Carla Ribas), who Eunice will later ask to act as a witness to the arrest of her husband when the state denies any such deliberate act, and who will later prove understandably reluctant to do so. Eunice spends much time in solitary confinement, with no provision of change of clothes or bathroom facilities. When released after 12 days, she learns that Eliana was released after 24 hours; Eliana tells her mum that she told her captors nothing.
Rubens, however, remains in custody. There is no news from the authorities, who refuse even to admit that they have taken him for questioning. Eunice’s life is transformed from contented, concerned wife and mother to that of a woman trying to discover what happened to her disappeared husband while trying to hold family life together.
This is a powerful family drama in the sense that it’s about a family, whose increasingly beleaguered matriarch is just trying to get by. It is full of astonishing detail – the husband being allowed to maintain his dignity in the family home before being driven away to questioning and likely torture; the wife in her first 24 hours of capture being led down a corridor past her daughter, both wearing hoods, who somehow sense one another’s immediate presence and speak briefly before being ordered to be quiet by her guards; the daughter, coming in from the street to find a ball to take outside for a game with friends, not realising she has effectively walked into a military arrest situation.
What the film doesn’t really do is hone in on the experience of those being tortured, except in passing as an episode in a much longer life. There is the occasional glimpse through a briefly passed, open door of, for example, someone being waterboarded, but if Salles has any interest in exploring such material, he swiftly moves on. The film thus lacks the impact of such films as The Mauritanian (Kevin Macdonald, 2021) or, particularly, the horrific National Security, Chung Ji-Young, 2012.
Much is made of the eldest daughter Veroca’s absence as a student in London while all this is going on. The camera never leaves Brazil, but we hear a letter from Veroca read to her siblings by her mother, only for Eliana to later demand to read the letter for herself and discover that much of its political content was not read to the family by their mother. In a dictatorship, people protect themselves and their loved ones by keeping potentially dangerous information from them. When Eunice is questioned in captivity, it becomes apparent that she was (and the other wives were) out of the loop in terms of their men’s subversive, anti-dictatorship activities, and she is now acting in similar fashion towards her own kids.
Most of the narrative takes place in 1971 and the years immediately after, but a small section at the end covers the situation and its effect on the family decades after. A deeply touching moment towards the end, with the ageing Eunice (now played by Fernanda Montenegro) as a dementia sufferer of a decade or so’s standing, sees her recognise her husband’s face on a TV documentary about the dictatorship’s atrocities. We also see grown up younger son Marcelo (Antonio Saboia), who wrote a book about the family’s experience and their mother’s struggle for justice on which this film is partly based (it’s largely inspired by director Salles’ memories, since he has known the family since he was a child, and spent a lot of time in their house when he was growing up).
I’m Still Here is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 21st.
Teaser Trailer (1:00):
Trailer (1:53):