Her Smile
By Eileen G’Sell
I’m Still Here
Dir. Walter Salles, Brazil, Sony Pictures Classics
A film about violence that depicts little violence, a film about healing that resists catharsis, Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is as uncommon as it is unsettling. Based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose father was among the 20,000 tortured during Brazil’s 21-year dictatorship, the movie follows the Paivas, a boho-bourgeoise family in Rio de Janeiro in the early ’70s. Rubens (Selton Mello), the playful patriarch, is a successful architect and former Congressman. His wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), is the true family leader—her face as unruffled as her A-line skirt whether chiding a daughter’s foul language or her son for smuggling a stray mutt into the house.
Less garrulous than her husband, but no less convivial, Eunice is more alert to the forces of surveillance and censorship that increasingly encroach on everyday life—both for the Paivas and their network of leftist friends. It is she who eyes a military helicopter hovering over the sea when the family picnics at Leblon Beach. It is she who enjoins their eldest daughter to head to London rather than attend college with her countercultural schoolmates. And it is she who confronts the government thugs who show up midday and seize Rubens for interrogation. “My children, they’re upstairs,” she informs the two men brandishing pistols in the foyer. “There’s no need for weapons.”
Torres is a formidable actor and her role offers a significant challenge. How should one play a woman who, overnight, goes from firm mother and stylish wife to a suspect of the state? In this case, she demonstrates that Eunice was never just a “wife and mother”; she was always a person of savvy resourcefulness. After Rubens is apprehended, Eunice must maintain an illusion of normalcy for the sanity of the four kids still at home. She must pretend that Rubens is traveling for work, even as each day his absence boosts the likelihood that he will never return. When she and her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are also taken in for questioning, they are held captive in a sunless maze of cells where screams puncture an endless night. Unable to see the torture, we, like Eunice, are left to imagine the worst as she marks each day with a scratch on the wall. When she is finally released after two weeks, Torres resembles a bird who has escaped a collapsed chimney: dazed, filthy, wings bent, hobbling home with enormous eyes.
At this point, I’m Still Here refuses to do what most movies do when they focus on a woman enduring the unendurable. That is, make her suffering the centerpiece, a spectacle of woe such that the inevitable emotional comeback is no less spectacular. This isn’t a movie that marvels at the throes of human despair, or at the preternatural resilience of one particular woman. It is instead a movie in which a mother chooses to carry on in fervid defiance, paving a way for her five children to do the same. As in Salles’s earlier films, like Central Station (1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), the heroism of the protagonist as an individual plays second fiddle to the larger purpose served. Eunice is no martyr, and she and the film are better for it.
Though Brazil saw the rise of its own women’s movement in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the movie exposes the ways in which Eunice’s sudden lack of a spouse imperils the Paivas’ economic stability. Without proof of Rubens’s death, she must navigate a byzantine financial system in which she, as a woman, holds little power. Bargaining with bankers to sell off the deed to the property Rubens was designing for the family’s future inhabitance, she stashes the cash, hawks her house, and packs up the kids to move to São Paolo with her parents. At 46, she goes back to school to study law, both to provide for her children and fight for justice in her country. We aren’t encouraged to view Eunice’s professional rise in feminist terms—which would likely feel revisionist—but rather as the logical trajectory for a woman committed to leading her family out of trauma.
Throughout the film, despite her politesse, Eunice often challenges or rejects male authority—coupling an exacting gaze with a calm, questioning tone.“Sorria,” Eunice tells her family to smile, after they are instructed by a photographer to “look less happy” for a news feature about their father’s disappearance. Their smiles are not disingenuous, but rather evidence of a bond made stronger through shared loss. Their father may never come back, but he would want them to keep going. They will not capitulate to despondency.
Given that women played a pivotal role in the re-democratization of Brazil in 1986, and again in recently voting President Jair Bolsanaro out of office, Eunice is of a piece with generations of women whose courage is extraordinary in its ordinariness. Given the film’s open acknowledgment of the dictatorship’s brutal legacy, it’s no surprise that Brazil’s right-wing parties have encouraged its citizens to boycott the film. Nor is it a surprise that this is one of the highest-grossing Brazilian films of all time. While it may be late to arrive on American screens, and discussion of the film has focused so much on awards season, I’m Still Here isn’t going anywhere.