Fernanda Torres is masterful in the poignant, Oscar-nominated I’m Still Here
It’s all in how Fernanda Torres carries herself in her Oscar-nominated turn in I’m Still Here – shoulders high, brow tensed but not knotted, and jaw jutted slightly forward. She looks as proud and elegant as a marble bust. The world around her character, Eunice Paiva, mother of five and wife of former congressman Rubens, has collapsed into an ugly chorus of helicopter blades, army trucks, and stomping boots. It’s 1970, in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil is under a military dictatorship that would last until 1985. Yet she will remain indefatigable.
Rubens has been ferried away by men in casual leather jackets with guns at their hips to give a “deposition”. That’s what they say. His family will never see him again. It will be 25 years before Eunice is able to hold his death certificate in her hands. These are all real people and real events, intimately captured by director Walter Salles in his first narrative feature since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I’m Still Here is interesting less for how it reflects biography than autobiography. While it’s formally an adaptation of the memoir Ainda Estou Aqui, written by Eunice’s son, Marcelo, Salles himself was childhood friends with the younger Paivas and a frequent guest in their home. And while it’s never consciously framed as such, there’s something of a child’s eye view to cinematographer Adrian Teijido’s sun-dappled images of familial bliss – of kids fussing over the stray terrier they find skittering across the beach, or stuffing their faces with ice cream at a local parlour.
At the dinner table, the camera stays low, peering up over plates and serving bowls and toward adult conversations. Editor Affonso Gonçalves frequently cuts in sequences shot by eldest child Vera (Valentina Herszage) on her handheld Super 8 camera, which becomes an important means of communication when she’s sent off to London for her own safety.
The whole film seems haloed by motherly affection, taking in Eunice’s movements as if she were a queen overseeing her domain. No soufflé is ever allowed to stick to the pan. And no curl of her Jackie Kennedy bob is ever allowed to bounce out of position. The film ends, poignantly, on an older Eunice. She’s played by Fernanda Montenegro, the first Brazilian actress nominated for an Oscar, for Salles’s Central Station (1998) – and Torres’s own mother.
That delicate embrace of harmony is not only how I’m Still Here begins, but how it continues after Rubens’s forced disappearance. Eunice’s defiance against the regime takes the form of joy. “You kill one person, you condemn the rest to eternal psychological torture,” she later tells the press. But it’s by understanding how that grief is merely another attack on freedom that she’s motivated to tell her children to keep smiling in photographs, to keep eating their ice cream.
When evil does make itself known, Salles captures it with the coded cordiality that authoritarianism likes to dress itself up in. Mild-mannered men come to close the curtains in the home, to loom silently at the edges of the film’s frames. Eunice doesn’t shrink away. She offers them something to eat. When she’s taken away to be interrogated (“routine questions”, they say, as the camera turns down towards the blood stains on the floor), she doesn’t give them the fear they crave, or the anger they need as an excuse. Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.
Dir: Walter Salles. Starring: Fernanda Torres, Fernanda Montenegro, Selton Mello, Guilherme Silveira, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Cora Mora. 15, 138 minutes.
‘I’m Still Here’ is in cinemas from 21 February
