Since most filmmakers are leftists, the Brazilian release I’m Still Here might strike naïve viewers as nonpolitical — many will think they’re simply responding to its melodrama. Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), a Rio de Janeiro eco-activist and mother of five, copes with the disappearance of her husband in 1970 during the country’s military dictatorship. It’s a heart-tugger, but it’s also politically cagey.
Director-producer Walter Salles, the world’s only billionaire filmmaker (heir to the Itaú Unibanco fortune), practices middlebrow sentimentality, and in I’m Still Here, he treads a tightrope, balancing political critique and family tragedy. Eunice learns of her husband’s communist background at the same time that she experiences the junta’s crackdown on dissidents. Salles moderates Eunice’s political awakening and emphasizes details of domestic life — her intimacy with burly, affable Rubens (Selton Mello), the hubbub of a rambunctious brood always competing and seeking attention, including teenage daughter Veroca (Maria Manoella), a rebel obsessed with British and Brazilian pop music, Godard, and Antonioni’s Blow-Up.
Recalling privileged bourgeois life like that captured by Louis Malle in Murmur of the Heart, Salles mixes 8mm home movies with dark political encroachment; he’s nostalgic for the vanished innocence of upper-class Brazilian society. The Paiva family tragedy is adapted from the memoir Feliz Ano Velho (Happy Old Year) by the oldest son Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), yet Salles heroizes Eunice, evoking the universality of female humanism as he did in his Central Station (1998), which starred Torres’s mother, Fernanda Montenegro. (Montenegro’s cameo appearance as elderly Eunice provides emotional continuity — a clever way for Salles to account for Brazil’s recent political transition from conservative President Jair Bolsonaro to leftist President Lula da Silva without taking sides.)
Eunice confronts forces of control and stays apolitical, but she grows skeptical when goons storm her home. She’s hooded and taken for interrogation in a building where she can hear screams of torture (including a black man singing a somber samba). Shaken with concern for Veroca, who is away at school in London, Eunice gradually becomes defiant. She insists that the family smile when a newspaper photographer asks them to look forlorn.
Salles doesn’t clarify his viewpoint until the end, when Eunice ages into senility. Her adult children look back on the domestic secrets, public deception, and national betrayal and confess their burden: They remember the big house they grew up in and the empty rooms they left behind. It’s an expressly bourgeois realization, and the closing montage of unpeopled, furniture-less rooms is Salles’s coup de cinéma. The sense of a place now lost — and missing a parent’s spirit — comes right out of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (but better than the Merchant-Ivory adaptation).
Such subtle politics makes I’m Still Here a testament to the narcissism of the leisure-class Left. That’s why the movie scored so well with this year’s Academy Awards. Plutocrat Salles masters a genre of polite, quasi-European social justice drama. (Central Station was his version of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves; this is his version of Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege.) Never risking outright political statement, Salles exemplifies the casual commitment Hollywood admires as a mirror of its own glib engagement.
The Oscar nominations for I’m Still Here prove that it idealizes the liberalism that American liberals have renounced. Eunice’s sorrow at henchmen invading her home (“There’s no need for weapons!”) conveys the kind of alarm that leftists shrugged off when Mar-a-Lago and the homes of pro-life Christians got raided. The kindly guard who releases Eunice from her inquisition (“I want you to know that I don’t approve”) contradicts those Democrats who disapprove of the pardoning of J6 prisoners. At Eunice’s homecoming, her youngest kids huddle around, but she never explains her politics or distress. (For that, see veteran Hollywood leftist Martin Ritt’s memorable portrayal in the mother’s confession scene in Norma Rae.)
Instead, Salles offers soft political melodrama that’s less frank than old Hollywood self-righteousness. Here, citizens discover it’s not the free country they took for granted, yet they take that news calmly. Salles’s mention of “military dictatorship” is incompatible with our media’s affirmation of “the good men and women” who participated in FBI SWAT teams that arrested J6ers and pro-lifers.
Before Salles’s trenchant closing montage, an epigraph warns, “Forced disappearances was one of the cruelest acts of the regime.” A better movie would put American viewers in touch with similar homeland injustices. But the political exoticism of I’m Still Here cushions Hollywood from suffering obvious American parallels.