I'm Still Here (15)

In 1970s Rio De Janeiro, the Paiva family are reunited when 17-year-old daughter Veroca returns home from the cinema after she and friends are roughly interrogated by armed forces. Shortly after Veroca travels to London to study, parapsychologist Dr Schneider and armed men storm the house and father Rubens, a former Brazilian Labour Party congressman, is led away. His wife Eunice and teenage daughter Eliana are forcefully questioned and the family's suffering begins.

LondonNet Film Review

I’m Still Here (15) Film Review from LondonNet

During decades of military dictatorship in Brazil, thousands of people, who were deemed opposition to the ruling regime, were victimised, threatened, tortured or murdered. Hundreds vanished and never returned. Their remains have never been unearthed. Award-winning Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles returns home for his first dramatic feature in more than a decade to relive the 1971 forced disappearance of Rubens Paiva as documented in the autobiography of the former Brazilian Labour Party congressman’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva…

Screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega choose the raid by armed men as a nerve-racking centrepiece of their slow-burning but riveting portrait of a liberal, middle-class Rio de Janeiro family in crisis. As the camera loiters in rooms of the Paiva family home, invaded by figures with guns tucked into trouser waistbands, Rubens calmly changes into a suit before he is taken away for questioning while his wife Eunice protects their clueless children from chilling reality by serving breakfast. It’s an impeccably staged sequence of benign domesticity under siege from silent, simmering menace.

Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres delivers a magnificent central performance as the terrified matriarch, who collides with various bureaucratic brick walls as she seeks to learn her husband’s whereabouts from military forces that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge his detainment. I’m Still Here lingers unbearably close to Eunice, her children and friends as a decades-long search for conclusive answers and an admission of culpability yields silence.

We first meet the Paivas in 1970 on the beach where Eunice (Torres) drifts calmly in the sea while nine-year-old Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) plays football and sisters, 13-year-old Nalu (Barbara Luz) and 15-year-old Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), top up their tans. Back home, housemaid Zeze (Pri Helena) looks after eight-year-old Babiu (Cora Mora) while father Rubens (Selton Mello) conducts a business meeting in his office.

The family are reunited when 17-year-old Veroca (Valentina Herszage) returns home from the cinema after she and friends are roughly interrogated by armed forces looking for suspects responsible for the kidnapping of a Swiss diplomat. Shortly after Veroca travels to London to study, parapsychologist Dr Schneider (Luiz Bertazzo) and armed men storm the house and Rubens is led away. Eunice and Eliana are forcefully questioned and the family’s suffering begins.

Nominated as Best Picture at next month’s Oscars, I’m Still Here is emotionally devastating for the opening 90 minutes but loses dramatic momentum with sequences set in 1996 and 2014 including a brief appearance by Fernanda Montenegro (Torres’s real-life mother) as the older incarnation of Eunice in the vice-like grip of Alzheimer’s. Torres is sensational, especially during Eunice’s confinement in military barracks where her body visibly thrums with exhaustion and terror. Impressive young co-stars navigate dark subject matter with aplomb and Salles’s unfussy direction captures the oppressive mood of an era that many can and will never forget.

– Jo Planter