Walter Salles’ powerful drama of resistance

Walter Salles’ international breakthrough in 1998, central stationwhich earned the gorgeous Fernanda Montenegro an Oscar nomination. The actress, who is in her 90s, appears near the end of the director’s shocking first feature film in his native Brazil in 16 years I’m still here (I’m still here), a role that required her to speak only through her expressive eyes. Even more poignant is the fact that she plays the frail protagonist – a woman of quiet strength and resistance who is remarkable in the face of emotional pain, played by Montenegro’s daughter Fernanda Torres of elegance and dignity.

Many powerful films have been made about Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, just as they have been about similar oppressive regimes in South American countries such as Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Human rights violations such as systematic torture, murder and enforced disappearance have left an unhealed wound in the psyche of these countries, and films often become the carrier of these countries’ collective memories.

Yet it’s not often that the spirit of protest against the horrors of military rule is seen through such an intimate lens. I’m still here. This is heightened by Salles’ personal investment in the film’s true story of the Paiva family, in which former congressman Patriarch Reubens (Selton Melo) was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, ostensibly to testify.

Salles met the family in the late 1960s and spent much of his teenage years in their home, which he considers fundamental to his cultural and political development. That’s why there’s so much energy in the early scenes, with the five Paiva siblings running back and forth between the house and the beach, bustling with a crowd of friends of all ages who seem to be constantly coming over to drink, eat, and listen to music.

There are some sweet moments, like the two sisters singing along to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s classic make-out song “Je t’aime… moi non plus.” Dancing and singing, but not understanding the lyrics. Watching how the youngest child Marcelo (Guillerme Silvera) sweet-talks a stray dog ​​found on the beach embodies the warmth, spontaneity and loving nature of the Paiva family. Fighting spirit. The young actors who play the children are all very natural and engaging.

When eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herzage) is out with a group of friends, their car is stopped at a tunnel roadblock, and the family’s bubble of intimacy and comfort is rudely breached for the first time. enter. It’s a disturbing scene as we watch teenagers – who just minutes earlier had been cruising together, sharing weed and laughing – being ordered at gunpoint to stand against a wall while officers They interrogated them, searching their faces for any resemblance to what they described as “terrorist killers.”

Occasional quiet phone conversations or personal exchanges with friends suggest that Rubens was involved in something that required keeping quiet. But the screenplay by Murillo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book, retains these details until long after Rubens was detained. This puts us in the same position as his wife and children, wondering what their father might have done to put him in the regime’s crosshairs.

The chill of uncertainty is hardest on Rubens’ wife Eunice (Torres), who goes to great lengths to hide what is happening from her youngest child. But having a stranger with a gun in the house and a car parked across the street to keep an eye on them was hard to explain, and the older siblings realized something was wrong.

The situation escalates when Eunice is brought in for questioning. Vera travels to London with family and friends, and her 15-year-old second daughter Eliana (Luiza Kozovski) is forced to accompany her mother with a bag over her head , not letting them know where they will be taken.

The interrogation scenes, set in a grim building with a solitary confinement cell, are harrowing. Eunice was quarantined for 12 days. Unable to contact the family lawyer, she had no idea what had happened to her daughter or where her husband was being held. Time and again she was forced to identify people in photographic documents as possible rebels, but apart from her husband she only recognized one woman who taught at her daughter’s school. Her isolation and fear were exacerbated by the constant screams of tortured people outside the walls.

There are many moments of raw tenderness following Eunice’s release – particularly when one of her daughters watches from the bathroom door as her mother washes away 12 days of grime in the shower, a look on her face that is both sad and horrifying.

As the government refused to even acknowledge the fact of her husband’s arrest, Younes continued to gather information, talking to Rubens’ friends, who told her that the military was “shooting blindly,” hunting down people at random with little to no concrete basis. Since she was unable to withdraw money from the bank without her husband’s signature, she struggled to maintain her expenses. At the same time, she began studying the family lawyer’s case files, foreshadowing her eventual decision to move to São Paulo with her five children and return to college.

The main focus of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book is essentially the silent heroism of his mother – first and foremost she single-handedly took on the responsibility of keeping the family together and protected when no one could She hid her grief when what she had avoided was confirmed, and later when she was in law school earning her law degree. This includes urging authorities to fully recognize missing persons like Rubens once democracy is restored in the country.

Salz’s heartfelt film jumps forward 25 years and then almost 20 years, allowing us to appreciate Eunice’s reinvention of herself not in a grand crusading speech but simply in She is part of a dedication to keeping the memory alive and not letting the abuse of the past be swept away.

Perhaps the most beautiful arc in the film is the gradual reconstruction of the family. As the children grow up, marry, and have grandchildren, they return to being a noisy, happy family, just like the carefree scene depicted at the beginning. Even the simple process of sorting through boxes of family photos is seen as a loving act of recycling in the final stages that will bring many viewers to tears.

Torres (one of the stars of Salles’s early brilliant films, foreign land“,” co-directed with Daniela Thomas, is a model of eloquent restraint, revealing Eunice’s inner anguish and her necessary resilience in the most subtle ways. Only once in the film does she raise her voice angrily after experiencing a sad event, banging on the window of a parked car, looking at a house in Rio de Janeiro, and speaking to the two expressionless men inside scream.

Montenegro’s final scenes in the role were bittersweet, as Eunice had become nonverbal, confined to a wheelchair, and was rapidly deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s disease. When Rubens’ picture appears in a TV show about a hero of the resistance, the poignancy is almost overwhelming as we see her gently leaning in, her eyes sparkling and a hint of a smile.

This movie looks gorgeous. Adrian Teijido’s nimble cinematography uses 35mm film effects to evoke the feel of the ’70s, while the Super 8mm home movies shot during that decade provide lovely punctuation. Another key asset of the film is Warren Ellis’s score, which starts out brooding and quietly disturbing, then shifts almost imperceptibly into a more emotional vein as the day progresses. Jumping forward, emotions surged.

While it could have used a less generic international title, nor a famous Stephen Sondheim song, I’m still here This is a gripping, touching and tragic film. This is one of Salz’s best works.