The big challenger to the beleaguered Emilia Pérez for the Best International Feature Oscar, I’m Still Here is a rare thing: a film that gives you a loving embrace while simultaneously delivering a massive gut punch. If it doesn’t actually take your breath away, it should certainly floor you emotionally.
Veteran director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) shines a light on a true story from one of the darkest periods in Brazilian history.
It’s Rio, 1970, and although the country is under a military dictatorship, the Paiva family seem like a nostalgic idyll of retro cool. Eunice (Fernanda Torres, up for best actress at the Academy Awards), husband Rubens (Selton Mello) and their five children breezily hanging on the beach; later dropping the needle on a slice of achingly hip vinyl tropicalia at a house soirée. Or their eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage) and friends cruising through the city in a car billowing with weed smoke, filming the streetscapes on her Super 8 camera (the grainy, blown-out footage from which is used to gorgeous effect).
However, Rubens is subtly up to something — he’s been fielding surreptitious phone calls. And then the shocks start to come…
Alarm bells are wailing slightly after those teenagers drive into a brutal army roadblock and the party is truly over when deathly silent agents of the state come knocking at the Paiva’s door to extract Rubens for “questioning” — to the sort of place where the corridors need to be regularly mopped of blood.
As the reality and terror of the situation unfolds, Eunice tries to hold herself and her children steady, the film following her heart-crushing ordeal and subsequent remarkable lifetime achievements. Torres is astounding as Eunice, every gesture of fear, pain and determination nuanced to perfection — perhaps the best female performance of the past year — while her very young supporting cast play out the slow destruction of their innocence superbly.
Besides the horror and outrage, Salles conjures up some exquisite moments of visual poetry. As Rubens languishes in a black hole of no one’s knowing, his fate uncertain, Eunice takes her kids to an ice cream parlour for some respite. Here, among the desperate hope, the camera pans across the girls’ table as they are playing a game of... hangman.
Yes, it’s a wrenching story, but above all this is a testament to an incredible woman. I was blown away by the generosity of compassion on display. In the face of inhumanity, Salles’s film simply radiates love.
In cinemas February 21
