A recent poll of Generation Z in the UK made stark reading. Over half of Britons aged between 13 and 27, it suggested, felt the country should be a dictatorship. A subgroup was more specific still: a third of those polled agreed the nation would be a better place “if the army was in charge”. Evidently, this is where we are. And with darkly good timing, we have I’m Still Here, the Oscar-nominated portrait of Brazil in 1971, and the reality of military rule, in which only generals need have opinions.
Yet the sky is blue, and the beaches full. And facing the sands in Rio is the loud and loving home of genial former congressman Rubens Paiva and his wife Eunice (Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres), parents of a boisterous unit of four daughters and a son, ranged from young childhood to 18. Change the context, and it could be a sitcom.
In fact, director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) knew the Paivas as the real family they were in 1971. Then he was a teenager. Now you sense wistful first-hand memories on screen. Posters for Bob Dylan albums cover bedroom walls. But it is the Paivas themselves to whom Salles clearly feels his deepest attachment. The family are sometimes seen in the Super 8 home movie footage directors use as shorthand for better days. Salles isn’t above sentiment. Here though, those grainy images feel meaningful.
The warmth the film gives off means we feel a still icier jolt when the house is entered by unsmiling officers from — well. Though clearly of the regime, they never do identify themselves. “I think they’re from the army,” Eunice whispers, as Rubens is driven away. The men with guns await further orders. The sequence unnerves, as it should: a family home made occupied territory.
It splits the film, and the Paivas’ lives, in two. Soon Eunice and an older daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are also taken to the black-site army base where they assume Rubens is held. (Salles is careful what he shows us in a de facto torture centre: enough to suggest both savagery and Kafka.)
But while the women return, Rubens Paiva does not. The movie fills with absence. Dramatically, much weight falls on Torres, sure-footed and quietly furious. Eunice must now care alone for the children, while still desperate to know what has happened to her husband, who she learns kept in touch with the last traces of opposition.
But information itself is made to disappear too. As days become weeks and then months, the fate of Rubens Paiva is never disclosed: a display of power as blunt as any violence.
That withholding sees the film stretch into decades ahead. Salles’ touch isn’t always assured in these jumps forward. But they are also key to the film. Had I’m Still Here been made 10 years ago, it might have registered as a simple tribute to resilience in a thankfully distant past. Now, in Brazil, a boycott of the film was called for by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, charged this week with allegedly attempting a new military coup after losing the 2022 presidential election.
Memories are short, and history easily forgotten. For their children, the film’s title can evoke either one of Rubens and Eunice Paiva. But what is still here too is the lure of the kind of “order” that took their father on a sunny day in 1971.
★★★★☆
In cinemas now