What's up, Enuffa.com fans? Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal!
Doin' a little catch-up from the 2024 slate of Best Pic nominees, today we're looking at I'm Still Here, directed by Walter Salles and starring Fernanda Torres in an Oscar-nominated turn. This film is a political biopic about one of thousands of families affected by the abhorrent Brazilian military dictatorship that controlled the country from 1964 to 1985. Dissenters were arrested, silenced, tortured, murdered and/or disappeared. It's estimated that over 400 people were either killed or went missing, while over 20,000 were tortured, and it should be noted that the inciting coup for this regime in '64 had the full support of the United States government. We sure do love spreading "freedom" across the globe, don't we?
Anyway, the film depicts the struggles of the Paiva family, led by former Brazilian Congressman Rubens and his wife Eunice. Rubens has returned to civilian life as an engineer but still surreptitiously aids the resistance without his family's knowledge. One day men with guns take him away for questioning, while others stay at the house to monitor the family. Then they take Eunice and her daughter Eliana away as well, keeping Eunice imprisoned for twelve days before sending them both home again. However Rubens is still missing, the government denies any wrongdoing (of course), and Eunice will have to spend literally decades trying to find out what happened to her husband.
Shot in a cinema vérité style, I'm Still Here has a documentary, day-in-the-life feel to it. We spend a good amount of time with Eunice and her family, experiencing their daily activities along with them before all the fascism shows up at their door. Rubens is often called away to "the office" or takes phone calls at odd hours, but like Eunice we're given plausible deniability since no specifics are revealed. When Rubens is taken away we're as bewildered as she, and when she is interrogated, starved and sleep-deprived for nearly two weeks, we experience her disorientation and the theft of her dignity.
Through it all though, Eunice remains determined to find justice, or if not justice, at least a sense of closure. When a fascist government won't even admit to doing anything fascist, the truth becomes negotiable (hmm, sounds familiar) and uncovering it becomes a years-long ordeal. But Eunice eventually opts to move the family to Sao Paolo and dedicates her life to holding the Brazilian government accountable for their actions. The film's second act is harrowing and hits very close to home these days, but the third is ultimately hopeful and redemptive.
Fernanda Torres gives a brilliantly understated performance here, going for naturalistic rather than showy. Eunice is quite often forced to internalize her emotions to spare her younger children from the terrifying knowledge that their father may never come home, and Torres excels in conveying it all. In fact all the performances reinforce the film's aim for realism and the dialogue often feels improvised and conversational. This was absolutely the right choice to tell this story; the audience should feel like a fly on the wall for how these events really transpired.
As someone who knew very little of these historical events going into the movie I think I'd have benefited from a little deep dive beforehand. Since the story is told through such a narrow lens showing mostly the small picture, it helps to know the big picture going in. In fact I didn't realize until the later sections that this was a true story, I thought this was a fictional family affected by real-world events. So do a bit of homework before you sit down with this one, it will make for a richer experience.
Overall I'm Still Here is an exceedingly effective look at how an oppressive government regime affects real people with real families, serving as a cautionary tale for America and other democratic countries currently flirting with fascism. Anyone who can't see human rights atrocities like these for what they are may simply be beyond the pale at this point.
I give I'm Still Here ***1/2 out of ****.
No comments:
Post a Comment