‘I’m Still Here’ Review: A Middling Political Drama
Walter Salles attempts to denounce Brazil’s MILITARY DICTATORSHIP in his family drama ‘I’m Still Here’ but accomplishes very little despite a committed performance by Fernanda Torres.
The opening scene of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here sets the political backdrop of 1970s Brazil with a stomach-churning lens. As Eunice Paiva’s (Fernanda Torres) family is enjoying time on the beach, the endless swarms of military trucks driving the streets of Rio de Janeiro posit total control of its inhabitants. Eunice’s children still go to school and engage in daily activities with their friends, but being outside, or even speaking on the phone, is no longer safe. Brazilians are living under military dictatorship and are constantly watched by its oppressive government, either implicitly or explicitly.
Eunice’s husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), was a former congressman who has since returned to Brazil after six years of exile following the 1964 coup d’état. While no longer a politician, Rubens continues to help expatriates without his wife – or family – knowing about it. As they enjoy the summer in Rio de Janeiro, and their eldest daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage), moves to London, sending them letters and films showcasing the idyllic time she is spending away from oppression, their life is interrupted by a knock at their door, when a group of unnamed individuals tell Rubens he must go to the police station for a deposition.
The audience knows this will likely be the last time the two will see each other. Eunice doesn’t know what is happening, while Rubens perfectly knows this is it for him. It’s not directly stated, but Rubens’ facial expressions and the fact that the individuals accept his request to change with a nicer set of clothes before leaving betray him. As he enters the car, Rubens’ last look at his wife tells us what will happen: he is not returning. A few days later, Eunice is also arrested and jailed. She is subsequently interrogated on whether or not she knew about her husband’s activities, but all she wants to know is if Rubens is alive.
Knowing nothing about what Rubens did, she is ultimately freed after twelve days in prison, and the rest of the film follows Eunice picking up the pieces, realizing that her husband is more than definitely dead. As Salles exposes Eunice’s life under military dictatorship, it’s clear that he wants a broader audience to know what has happened during the darkest time in the country’s history while also looking into the future in reminding us that any family who was affected by this is still having difficulty carrying on, exacerbated by a flashforward in time with an older Eunice, played by Torres’ real-life mother and legend of Brazilian cinema, Fernanda Montenegro.
And yet, there’s a certain distance plaguing I’m Still Here’s political text that renders the movie ineffective, not to mention way too long. In a year where cineasts like Radu Jude and Mohammad Rasoulof spoke truth to power and engaged with their respective sociopolitical backdrops further than presenting it and showing what during and post-Ceaușescu Romania and Iran looked like in their respective films, for Salles to take a distanced stance in I’m Still Here feels relatively incurious and gutless. It seems as if Salles thought it best to observe the characters without peering into how they can’t truly “move on” in the wake of Rubens’ disappearance rather than fully taking a hard stance on the material depicted on screen.
There are a few scenes that attempt to say something about the regime and how, when it eventually cuts to twenty-four years later, Brazil is still trying to right the wrongs they perpetrated not only for Eunice’s family but for all families who were directly affected by the regime. Still, these moments occur so sparsely that one wonders precisely what Salles wants to say about the real-life family he depicts and, most importantly, its central figure, arguably an important one in Brazil’s history. Rubens’ disappearance and eventual death inspired Eunice to not only be a strong activist against Brazil’s military dictatorship but also advocate for human rights of victims of political repression and Indigenous rights, fighting for the acknowledgment of the death of disappeared people during the dictatorship, and against all kinds of violence perpetrated by the regime against its people.
Yet, all of this is barely explored, even if Salles makes Eunice the story's central figure. She is why Torres has been getting so much attention at this year’s awards season, and even surprisingly beat favorites Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson, and Tilda Swinton at the 82nd annual Golden Globes, while also snagging a surprise Oscar nomination against potential contenders like Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Whether her performance is worthy of such an award is debatable, but Torres is the single reason why the film is mostly watchable. She holds our attention from the minute the movie opens with her floating in the wter, attempting to relax while everything around her is crumbling down. It’s an apt visual metaphor for what will come next.
In the film’s best sequence, Eunice and her family are asked to be photographed for a magazine after Rubens’ abduction. The mother wants everyone to smile because she believes the family should be represented as they are, resilient in the wake of such a harrowing event. They are still carrying on despite the lingering doubt about whether Rubens is alive, which she believes matters a great deal. In contrast, the journalist and photographer think they should be more serious, given the situation at hand. Eunice doesn’t even budge. “We smile,” she says. They do. And they should.
A scene like this is rife with meaning because it gives information to the audience about the type of character Eunice was in real life before illness ultimately struck her, and she lived her last fifteen years on this planet with Alzheimer’s. However, there just aren’t enough moments like these that are way more powerful than scenes where Eunice is locked up and is forced to testify on events she has no idea were occurring at her house because, even amidst the nightmare that she and her family went through, she is still here, holding this household together.
Unfortunately, just as I’m Still Here was heading to a genuine gut-punch of an ending, Salles switches gears (à la Brady Corbet in The Brutalist) and transitions into two epilogues, much later after the film’s main event. While the first effectively gives Eunice the coda she has always wanted, the second dilutes the initial conclusion's emotional impact. Of course, Salles’ intentions are clear, but even then, it interminably stretches the runtime to an unearned scene that feels tacked on instead of the powerful cri-de-coeur such as this story could have.
As a result, I’m Still Here never truly grabs your attention, no matter the substantial parts the film boasts. As a political drama, it’s adequate. As a family drama, it’s perfectly serviceable. And Fernanda Torres is good enough for us to keep watching. But ‘adequate’ just doesn’t cut it anymore when making a politically-charged film, especially when Jude and Rasoulof showed all of us how to raise social awareness in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, films that are so much more worth your time, and urgently so.