When Walter Salles’ first film since On the Road, from 2012, debuted at Venice International Film Festival last September there was some talk of Oscar potential, but few guessed, as eventually happened, that it would be among the 10 best-picture nominees.
It seemed still less likely that I’m Still Here would become a box-office sensation. Yet, thanks in large part to interest from Brazilian film fans, the film is already doing Barbie business in some Irish cinemas.
All this for a work that is restrained – borderline passive – to a tasteful fault. Salles here deals with one among countless political outrages in his home country during its years of dictatorship. In 1971 Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and a former left-wing congressman, was arrested on obscure charges in Rio de Janeiro.
His wife, Eunice, and daughter, Eliana, were also detained, the former for a day, the latter for nearly two weeks. Paiva was never seen again seen, and the family were compelled to live their lives with a looming vacancy.
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The scenes covering Eunice’s detention take up a relatively brief segment of the film. We see Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated in the role, curling up on the floor while the wails of torture victims echo along the corridor. I’m Still Here is mostly taken up with a largely sunny preamble and a subsequent period of adjustment.
The title, taken from the source memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Eunice and Rubens’s son, clarifies that this is a tale of survival away from the central catastrophe. It is a tale of waiting. It is a tale of getting by. It is a tale of quiet readjustment.
Salles was a friend of the family, and that perhaps helps explain why the opening sections so often skirt the idyllic. True, the film begins with a wonderfully forbidding shot. Eunice is swimming in the ocean as a military helicopter buzzes overhead: normality beneath an always watchful state apparatus.
It is hard not to think of Alfonso Cuarón’s depiction of precisely contemporaneous Mexico City in Roma as middle-class lives are lived out in the shadow of political instability.
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The kids find a dog on the beach and persuade the parents to let him into their home. The cultured teenagers enjoy Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blowup as one daughter prepares to travel to London. The kids are stopped by the military, suspicious of their hippie-adjacent style, but it would, surely, be possible to believe life could continue in this largely agreeable fashion.
That complacency is challenged when plain-clothes goons (largely polite) arrive at the house and start asking awkward questions.
Salles, who directed Torres’s mother, Fernanda Montenegro, to an Oscar nomination for Central Station in 1998, has always been the most gently humanistic of film-makers. His version of On the Road suffered, perhaps, from an unwillingness to fully grasp the selfishness of Jack Kerouac’s characters.
One can’t help think what an angrier film-maker would make of a story that here settles into the gentlest of lolloping rhythms. We learn little of how Eunice set about securing her husband’s death certificate. The later, telescoped flash-forwards (the final featuring Montenegro as the older Eunice) feel like footnotes rather than an integrated part of the drama.
What makes I’m Still Here come alive is Torres’ faultless performance as the stabilising force in a family’s drift back to compromised normality. The veteran actor knows how to hide her concern from sons and daughters while allowing it to leak out to us. She stands in for a whole nation putting on a brave face while malign forces snap from all sides.
Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.
In cinemas from Friday, February 21st, with previews from Tuesday, February 18th
