Film Review | Family and Mental Bondage
Walter Salles’ Oscar-Winning ‘I’m Still Here’ Deals Subtly with Political and Deeply Personal Tragedy of the Brazilian Dictatorship
'I'm Still Here', starring Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres | Photo: Alile Onawale for Sony Pictures Classics
I’m Still Here, which recently extended its theatrical release shelf life by winning this year’s Best Foreign Film Academy Award — bears a deceptively simple but deeply layered title. What Brazilian director Walter Salles has created here grapples with themes of historic, political, and also personal dimensions, as one of the greatest films yet dealing with Latin American dictatorships’s policy of disappearing suspected enemies of the state. In this case, the offending regime is the cruel and long-lasting one in Brazil, from 1964 to 1985.
But beyond its status as an important work of truth-seeking as a tale dealing with the true story of former congressman Rubens Paiva in the early ‘70s, the film is fueled by themes of the persistence of memory, both warm and haunting. Despite the tragic State-sponsored absence, he’s still there, in the myriad family memory bank, in the steady flow of photographs and Super 8 films which propel the story, through the songs of exiled singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and even through the dense fog of life with Alzheimer’s.
As our strong wife and mother character Eunice explains, the aspect of missing and not knowing a beloved’s fate becomes a form of “psychological torture.”
At the galvanizing center of Salles’s film is a commanding performance by veteran Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, who creates a nuanced portrait of a family matriarch of great, understated inner strength and determination in the face of outrageous adversity. She recognizes the importance of her role as a mother, keeping a brave face while steering her five children through an emotional thicket, and registering her own interior tumult with the subtlest of gestures rather than histrionics.
Beyond its compelling tale, I’m Still Here also represents an “I’m still here” moment for the seasoned actress, 59, whose work earned a Golden Globe award (the first for a Portuguese-speaking actress) and an Oscar nomination. Torres also showed up in the star-studded “Virtuosos” tribute night at the recent Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where she mentioned having worked with Salles on the 1996 Foreign Lands and crediting his casting: “Walter saved me for drama. I’m back.”
As an all together fitting denouement to I’m Still Here, as the end credits roll, inspired cinematographer Adrian Teijido’s camera slowly roams through the empty Rio de Janeiro house the fatherless family left before relocating in Sao Paulo in 1971, which suddenly becomes a resident symbol of its former residents’ emptied life. Empty, except that he’s still there.
View trailer here.
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