In ‘I’m Still Here,’ a compelling search for justice in 1970s Brazil

The truism “The personal is political” has never seemed more apt than in the new movie “I’m Still Here.” Brazil’s Oscar submission for best international feature, it centers on the real-life Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), a mother of five. Her husband, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a former congressman exiled for a time, was “disappeared” by the reigning military dictatorship in 1971. The film is both a powerful portrait of a displaced family and, inevitably, a drama of a country under siege.

The director, Walter Salles, who grew up in Rio de Janeiro as a friend of the middle-class Paiva family, has described the movie as “both the story of how to live through loss and a mirror of the wound left on a nation.” Because virtually all of the action is filmed from the perspective of Eunice, the result is doubly bracing. We are caught up in a political maelstrom, and yet the effect is startlingly intimate. The Paiva family members may be representative of the many Brazilians who suffered during the two decades of dictatorship, but we are never made to feel that they are merely generic. Their plight and their fortitude are too real for that.

The film opens on a deceptively convivial note. The Paiva children, including Vera (played as a young woman by Valentina Herszage) and Marcelo (played as a boy by Guilherme Silveira), are gamboling on a sunny beach, playing volleyball, and chasing a stray puppy. When they return to the sprawling family home, the festive vibe endures. Eunice clearly enjoys being the harried matriarch. Rubens relishes his role as a put-upon papa. (He grudgingly allows Marcelo to keep the puppy.) 

The good times, of course, are fleeting. Vera, who is planning to study in London, is detained at a military roadblock with her partying friends. She is released, but the note of impending doom is sounded. Rubens is soon visited at home by military authorities and carted off. Eunice and another daughter, Eliana (Marjorie Estiano), are likewise brought in for questioning, and briefly locked up.

Eunice is never told what has happened to her husband. His disappearance frames the remainder of the film, which ultimately spans four decades. She learns that, without her knowledge, he had secretly been aiding dissidents. Despite this revelation, she holds no rancor toward Rubens because it’s clear she would expect nothing less from him. In her own way, she is as much a champion of justice as he is. Realizing that he may never be seen again, she nevertheless fights for his return while struggling to keep her family intact.

With everything this film has going for it, it might still not have hit home but for Torres’ shattering performance. Salles and his screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, drew on a 2015 memoir by the grown-up Marcelo Paiva. Clearly they see Eunice as a force of nature. But Torres does something quite daring: She humanizes Eunice without once relying on obvious emotional cues. There are no scenes of her sobbing or breaking apart in rage. She knows that the happiness of her brood, which she values above all else, also represents the ultimate rebuke to the dictatorship.

As shown in the film, Eunice Paiva became a lawyer in midlife and a renowned defender of human rights. We see her at the end of that life, her mind clouded, at a joyous family gathering. She is played in this brief scene by Torres’ mother, the legendary actor Fernanda Montenegro. 

The effect, especially for those who remember Montenegro from her great work in Salles’ “Central Station,” is emotionally overwhelming. It’s as if this real-life mother and daughter are in communion with each other. “I’m Still Here” is a movie about remembrance – of a family and a nation. The necessity to acknowledge injustice is its timeless clarion call. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “I’m Still Here” is rated PG-13 for thematic content, some strong language, drug use, smoking, and brief nudity. The film is in Portuguese with English subtitles.