Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I’m Still Here’ on VOD, In Which Fernanda Torres Carries an Extraordinary and Oscar-Winning Historical Drama

Just gonna come right out and say it: I’m Still Here (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is one of the best movies I’ve seen in months, maybe THE best. The Brazilian film from director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) just won Best International Feature at the Oscars, after landing nods for best picture and best actress, for a phenomenal performance by Fernanda Torres. It’s a biopic framed as a historical drama, based on the life of Eunice Paiva, the wife of a former politician, Rubens Paiva, who was the subject of gross injustice at the hands of a Brazilian military junta in the 1970s. Torres’ depiction of Eunice is a towering achievement that deserves all the accolades it received (and then some), powering a film that’s suspenseful, gripping and in some ways unforgettable.

I’M STILL HERE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Home. This place is home: Rio de Janeiro. The Paiva family lives a comfortable existence in a house in the heart of the city. Inside, spacious rooms filled with golden natural light. Outside, the bustle of urban life, and across a boulevard, the beach, where the children play soccer and volleyball with their friends, and find a scraggly stray dog to bring home and love. And love, well, it seems to be everywhere. In the walls, in the sand, in the faces and voices of this family. The father, Rubens (Selton Mello) is a former Labor Party congressman, now a private-sector engineer. The mother, Eunice (Torres), corrals the children with the help of their housekeeper and nanny, Zeze (Pri Helena). There are five of them, and I’ll be honest, it takes a moment to sort and count them from the flurries of robust activity: There’s Babiu (Cora Mora) and Eliana (Luisa Kosovski) and Nalu (Barbara Luz) and Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) and Veroca (Valentina Herszage) is the oldest, and they all spill in and out of the home with friends and the dog trailing them while Rubens and Eunice host gatherings with friends and the place rarely seems to settle into calm even at night, especially when Rubens and Marcelo engage in a clattery knock-down drag-out game of foosball. It’s 1970.

Eunice often enjoys an ocean swim, and I’d say it’s a calming and peaceful moment for her, if a helicopter wasn’t battering its blades against the air overhead as a reminder that the country is in the grip of a brutal police-state dictatorship. Veroca and her friends are stopped at a checkpoint and glared at by grim soldiers comparing their faces to a wanted poster bearing the visages of terrorists. At the house, Rubens and Eliana watch a news report about the kidnapping of a Swiss ambassador by a rebel group demanding a hostage exchange, just as Veroca gets home, shaky and upset by the rough treatment from police. Close friends of the Paivas are moving to England to escape the fascist regime, and trying to get Eunice and Rubens to pack up the kids and join them. They don’t really consider it – “It’ll pass soon,” Rubens insists – but they decide that Veroca, who’s recently finished high school, will join them to study in London. 

It’s been well established in the opening scenes that the Paivas have a wonderful life in Brazil, and it’s easy to see why they’d resist leaving the sunshine and love love love of their home. Home. Their home. But there’s something in the air, menace perhaps, in every ring of the telephone or doorbell. Several years have passed since Rubens’ political career ended, but times like these are not ruled by reasonable men. Veroca has been gone long enough to send back a reel of film, on which she shares images of London, and a letter which Rubens reads aloud to the whole family as they watch. One day the doorbell rings and men who don’t look “official” in the traditional sense say they need Rubens to come with them for a “deposition.” He smiles calmly and comfortingly to the children as he leaves with them. It’s routine. Procedure. Just asking questions, the men say. Three of the men stay behind. Did I mention they have guns? The men have guns. Eunice keeps the three youngest children calm, telling them they’re with pest control – which doesn’t explain the guns, or the stern, suspicious faces. Then they decide Eunice and Eliana need to take part in depositions too. They are not reasonable men, and neither are the men at the place they’re going, with black sacks over their heads, essentially at gunpoint.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Salles’ depiction of a busy upper-middle-class family that’s always in motion is as absorbing as Alfonso Cuaron’s similarly triumphant Roma. And the immersion into 20th-century period detail in Brazil rivals that of the grossly underrated drama Invisible Life.

Performance Worth Watching: Torres probably deserved that Oscar. Her depiction of Eunice stacks layer upon layer upon layer as this mother works to hold together her family, protecting the youngest, confiding in the oldest (to a degree), and holding out hope for the best possible fate for her husband while also silently accepting the more probable reality. Few actors have such dexterity, presence and depth.

Memorable Dialogue: Eunice seeks help from a friend who may know something about where Rubens is being held, and why:

Eunice: My husband’s in danger, Martha.

Martha: We’re all in danger.

Sex and Skin: A brief shower scene.

Our Take: The sequences of the occupation of the Paivas’ home and Eunice’s detainment are so maddening and realistic, I’m Still Here bordered on the type of highly effective unpleasantry we experience in films that are essential viewing, but aren’t likely to be watched again. However: Let it be known that the story of Eunice, this life in which we’re so deeply immersed and emotionally invested, by the grace of the universe or god or fate or luck, doesn’t end in that detention center. There’s plenty of movie after those moments where Eunice lies in a grubby cell for days, separated from her daughter, unaware of where her husband is, listening to other captives being tortured, occasionally being escorted out and sat down by men with ugly, corrupt souls who want her to page through their book of mugshots and point out anyone they might need to – well, we don’t know. But people are being disappeared by these bastards. 

Whether Eunice knows anything or is utterly bewildered and in the dark isn’t quite certain, or frankly the point of the film. Torres digs so impressively deep to characterize a woman who watches the home she loves get invaded, violated and torn apart, and doing her damnedest to keep it together, to hold herself together for the sake of her family, to let the men watching her from the car across the street just sit there and stare. She has a small support network, and some of those people know things she doesn’t, so the situation is one of discovery for her, and she has to swallow those discoveries whole for the sake of her childrens’ safety and psychological well-being. 

Salles’ direction is exquisite. He uses handheld cameras to capture the immediacy of life – and the immediacy of danger – shooting on film for the authentic graininess of the era. The way he captures the Paivas being simply an active, happy family is carefully considered at the same time its freewheeling and organic. He shapes tone and overall vibe like a master sculptor, balancing comforting everyday banality with uncertainty, and the manner in which Eunice struggles with not knowing her husband’s fate becomes a microcosmic representation of how life, real life, is a bundle of doubt and confusion and anxiety that adults must compartmentalize for the sake of their sanity, and to maintain their childrens’ ability to experience love, joy and certain degrees of freedom for as long as possible. Eunice’s illusion of security has been ripped away, never to return, which is something one doesn’t just roll with. It needs to be managed, like pain or trauma.

And of course I’m Still Here is a political film, a potent depiction of oppression that’s rarely dramatized in a literal sense, but silently proliferates the narrative like a poisonous gas leak. Eunice isn’t a flimsy personality – prior to Rubens’ detention, seemed to live the Good Life, to a lesser degree like a socialite. But once her support beam is gone, she slowly comes to the realization that she has much work to do both inside the house and out, and accepts it with external grace, but great internal fear, grief and apprehension. Watch Torres carefully as Eunice takes the kids out to eat and sees other families, laughing and happy and not torn asunder, and you’ll see all these emotions at war within her as she maintains her calm. Oppression by its very nature cultivates activism, and you can see that revelation in her eyes, too.

Our Call: I’m Still Here is a riveting drama, sometimes soaked with dread and difficult to watch. But it’s never inauthentic, especially Torres’ performance, which leaches hope from desiccated soil. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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