Monthly Archives: February 2025

  • Picnic at Hanging Rock

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Weir (1975)

    [Two impressions of the film – nearly fifty years apart.  As usual, a ‘Take 1/Take 2’ arrangement to juxtapose the notes but they’re more than usually different from each other:  the 1970s note was obviously incomplete!]

    Take 1

    In the first shot of Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), a gnarled old Aborigine man is painting primitive-looking designs on the underside of a mass of jutting stone in the shadow of which he sits cross-legged.  ‘Hanging rock’, announced a smart-aleck voice in the cinema, referring to the director’s previous film.  Picnic at Hanging Rock is a beautifully composed but dramatically thin account of an Australian cause célèbre – the disappearance, without trace, of pupils and a teacher on a girls’ school outing on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900[1].  The real-life-unsolved-mystery of the story removes the need for Weir to explain the supernatural atmosphere he creates in which to shroud the vanishing – a combination of sound, editing rhythm and visual compositions that alternate between sunlit paradise and forbidding terra incognita.   (Some of the compositions bring the paintings of Sidney Nolan to mind.)   The girls, in their trance-like movement and diaphanous dresses, are so ethereal that disappearing into thin air seems a natural tendency of their physical condition.  The first part of Picnic at Hanging Rock is intriguing; after the girls and their teacher have dematerialised, the film runs down.  The ‘mystery’ begins to lose its grip – partly as one grows accustomed to Weir’s technique, partly too because the director seems to lose interest in the matter of what happened.  He pursues conventionally the investigations, public and private, into the disappearance and explores superficially the psychological effect of the affair on the major characters of the story.  The most interesting element of Picnic is its depiction of the schoolgirls (if not their teacher) as turn of the century ephemera, as representing a long-gone as well as a short-lived species of human life.

    While the girls are picnicking, Russell Boyd’s camera contemplates them in God’s-eye view long shot and describes the microscopic world around and beneath them.  Both perspectives suggest that the girls are a thin, decorative layer topping a much more substantial creation – implied in the pulsing variety of sounds and brought startlingly under one’s nose in a close-up of the ground, teeming with insect life.  The Gheorghe Zamfir panpipe music that Weir uses to score the picture sends the mind way back, from the specific time and place that the sets and costumes precisely convey to ‘earlier and other creation’.  Hanging Rock itself, implacably and unthinkably old, reinforces the sense of more-things-in-heaven-and-earth than were dreamt of in the philosophy of a single-sex Australian boarding school in the twilight of the Victorian era.  The most memorable line in Cliff Grant’s script is triggered by the dry-as-dust maths mistress.  She reels off facts and figures about the enormous age of the rock and one of the girls replies, ‘Waiting a million years, just for us’.  This may or may not be meant as a spuriously arrogant human reaction to evolution’s daunting timescale.  Either way, it expresses succinctly the collision of long-standing and transient forms of existence.  In The Last Wave, Peter Weir remains preoccupied with atmosphere, the hugeness of nature and the unconscious, the relative limits of the conscious mind.  Dreams figure prominently and restore you to a childish attitude towards the light of day – which takes away not only the dark but also the possibility of nightmares.

    [1970s]

    [1] Afternote:  These references to the factual basis of the film are wrong.  Picnic at Hanging Rock was adapted from a 1967 book by Joan Lindsay – a work of fiction, although Wikipedia notes as follows:

    ‘The novel … begins and ends with a pseudo-historical prologue and epilogue …. However, while the geological feature, Hanging Rock, and the several towns mentioned are actual places near Mount Macedon, the story is not completely [sic] true. Lindsay had [sic] done little to dispel the myth that the story is based on truth, in many interviews either refusing to confirm it was entirely fiction, or hinting that parts of the book were fictitious, and others were not. Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1900 was a Wednesday, not a Saturday as depicted in the story. All attempts by enthusiastic readers to find historical evidence of the event, characters, or even Appleyard College, have proved fruitless.’

    Take 2

    Wikipedia’s entry on Australian New Wave Cinema explains that, by the early 1960s, the Australian film industry was nearly extinct and dates its renaissance, in the shape of the Australian New Wave, from the early 1970s.  Some of the earliest entries in the list of films that follows, however, are at best qualified examples of New Wave cinema.  While Australian landscape and culture are certainly essential to Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (both 1971), neither film was made by an Australian.  Bruce Beresford is Australian and an important New Wave director but his debut feature, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), is set in England and an example of ‘Ozploitation’ comedy.  The first films made by Peter Weir – who would go on to be internationally the most successful Australian filmmaker of his generation (even more successful than Beresford and Fred Schepisi) – are a different matter.  The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) is a horror comedy, set in a small rural town in New South Wales.  Weir’s next film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, has reasonably been described as ‘Australia’s First International Hit’.  It’s now celebrating its fiftieth birthday with a 4K restoration and re-release.

    This BFI screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock must have been at least my third viewing all told – but the first time I’d watched the film aware that it’s not based on actual events.  Whether or not that should have made a difference to how I saw things, it did.  The film barely speculates as to the fate of the two teenage pupils and the mathematics mistress who go missing, never to return, on a day trip from a school called Appleyard College on Valentine’s Day 1900.  Peter Weir and the scriptwriter, Cliff Green, make no bones about this:  introductory text on the screen explains that ‘To this day their disappearance remains a mystery’ – yet those very words seem to imply a real-life basis to the story we’re to be told.  If the unsolved mystery were a matter of fact, we’d accept not getting an answer to what happened to the trio.  It’s hard to allow fiction the same leeway.  We rather expect its creators to make sense of the world they construct, never mind that the world we live in tends not to make sense.  When a writer or filmmaker decides not to do this, it feels like a dereliction of duty.

    The definite tone of that opening legend isn’t an invention on Weir and Green’s part, though.  As mentioned in the footnote to ‘Take 1’, Joan Lindsay’s novel, on which the film is based, ‘begins and ends with a pseudo-historical prologue and epilogue ….’  According to Jan Dawson’s Sight and Sound (Spring 1976) interview with Peter Weir, which forms part of the BFI handout for Picnic at Hanging Rock, the source novel deceives the reader in ways the film doesn’t:  Lindsay, Dawson wrote, channels ‘the omniscient condescension of an Agatha Christie’.  Weir can’t be accused of that.  As he made clear to Jan Dawson, he was ‘more interested in atmosphere than character’ – and atmosphere is his priority throughout.  My chief disappointment with Picnic at Hanging Rock revisited came from finding its creation of atmosphere, especially in the lead-up to the vanishing, more long-winded and emphatic than I’d remembered.

    Golden-haired Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), who will be one of the disappeared, is well-named and central to the design.  The film’s opening words – ‘What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream’ – are spoken by her (says IMDb, though the speaker is off-camera); they can hardly fail to evoke words in a play featuring another Miranda (not just ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ but also, given what’s going to happen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, ‘spirits … melted into air, into thin air’).  There’s a trance-like quality to the early narrative, thanks to Russell Boyd’s ingenious lighting and Max Lemon’s editing, but the flow of images is sometimes interrupted by overly significant lines.  Miranda tells Sara (Margaret Nelson), her roommate and admirer, ‘You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara, I won’t be here much longer’.  The French mistress, Mlle de Poitiers (Helen Morse), leafing through an art history book, likens Miranda to a ‘Botticelli angel’.  This is true only up to a point:  Anne-Louise Lambert is paradisally lovely but also very aware of the camera.

    The dominance of atmosphere in what follows the pivotal disappearance is unsatisfying in a different way.  The young Englishman Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard), also picnicking in the area on Valentine’s Day, with his aunt and uncle, becomes obsessed with finding the missing members of the school party.  Albert Crundall (John Jarratt), the Fitzhubert family’s young factotum, joins Michael on his quest; when Albert warns it will soon be dark, Michael insists on staying on the rock – ‘because somebody has to’.  He’s not wrong:  the police investigation is perfunctory, to say the least.  It seems meant to be, yet you can’t help feeling that also reflects Peter Weir’s own uninterest in this side of the story.  At the same time, Weir doesn’t dispense with elements of Joan Lindsay’s plot.  I’d forgotten that, although four people disappear, one of the three girls, Irma (Karen Robson), is found, by Albert, days later.  Irma is physically unscathed but, of course, unable to remember what caused her to lose consciousness and her companions, Miranda and Marion (Jane Vallis), to vanish.

    In some cases, the voices of the younger performers were ‘dubbed in secret by professional voice actors, as Weir had cast the young actresses for their innocent appearance rather than their acting ability’ (Wikipedia).  Yet the deliberate playing and delivery extends to more experienced actors, too – Dominic Guard and Helen Morse are among the few exceptions.  As the headmistress, Rachel Roberts is certainly authoritative.  Roberts’ vocal power is one part of that; another is Mrs Appleyard’s extraordinary coiffure – easily mistaken, at first sight, for helmet-like headgear.  When the camera shows a coil of the headmistress’s hair out of place, it’s a sure sign she’s coming apart – because the Hanging Rock scandal has led parents to withdrawing their daughters from her school.  Drink dependency and suicide soon follow.  (Mrs Appleyard’s breakdown makes for particularly unhappy viewing if you know Rachel Roberts’ own fate.)  Other familiar faces in the cast include Vivean Gray (Mrs Mangel in Neighbours, a decade or so later), as the maths mistress Miss McCraw, and Jacki Weaver, as Minnie, a maid at the College.

    The too emphatic voices, although uncomfortable to listen to, do contribute to Picnic at Hanging Rock‘s oddness of mood – simply because they’re incongruous with the beguiling visuals.  They are, in other words – even if this isn’t what the actors or the director intended – part of the atmosphere that Weir so prized.  The mismatch between visual sophistication and often rudimentary acting also has the effect of sharpening one’s awareness of the film as historically significant.  Picnic at Hanging Rock, at this distance in time, represents Australian cinema on the cusp of change rather than on the crest of the New Wave.  Fred Schepisi’s early features, The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), are more powerful and persuasive New Wave dramas.

    The Australian New Wave directors sometimes gave the impression of being anxious to confound stereotyped ideas about the Aussie male – to make their work look as beautifully artful as possible, at the expense of other elements.  A prime example of this tendency, Picnic at Hanging Rock conveys a palpable sense of Peter Weir’s aesthetic ambition.  You can feel, and enjoy, his excitement in working, with Russell Boyd and art director David Copping, to construct fancy imagery.  Birdlife, for example, both echoes and seems to comment on the schoolgirls.  The white turkeys in the grounds of Appleyard College run freer than the white-clad girls are allowed to do on the outing to Hanging Rock.  (Mrs Appleyard gives strict instructions – no climbing on the dangerous outcrop, watch out for the poisonous snakes – as the girls, and the two staff supervising them, prepare to depart.  It’s the more permissive Mlle de Poitiers who, after lunch, agrees to Miranda’s request that she and the other girls venture further.)  A swan, seen swimming later in the film, becomes Miranda’s virtual avatar; there’s also an ornamental swan in the room that she shared with Sara.

    What has aged best in the film is Weir’s treatment of the sexual undertow of Appleyard College.  This single-sex private school – an ‘Educational Establishment for Young Ladies’ – is situated in the state of Victoria and, in time, at the very end of the reign of the queen for whom the state is named.  The only men about the place are menials.  The only evidence of sexual activity involves servants, as Minnie hurriedly dresses after a session in bed with handyman Tom (Anthony Llewellyn Jones).  Mrs Appleyard is a widow; the other teaching staff, including prematurely frumpy Miss Lumley (Kirsty Child), are unmarried.  On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the girls smile over messages they’ve sent to each other; one of them giggles that ‘Somebody had the nerve to send Miss McCraw a card on squared paper covered with tiny sums’.

    The maths mistress will be an important figure in the story.  En route to the picnic site, she trots out facts about the relative ages of Hanging Rock and of surrounding rock formations; after the picnic, she notices that her pocket-watch has stopped (‘Never stopped before – must be something magnetic’).  Yet just before Miranda and the others disappear into the rock crevice, Miss McCraw is, unaccountably, standing close by.  A fourth schoolgirl, Edith (Christine Schuler), accompanies Miranda, Irma and Marion on their fateful journey but only so far.  An habitual moaner, clumsy, bespectacled Edith emerges from the rocks screaming.  She raises the alarm with Mlle de Poitiers and gives the only, limited testimony as to what happened on Hanging Rock.  As she was coming back down the hill, Edith met the maths mistress, on her way up; Miss McCraw wasn’t wearing a skirt – ‘just les pantalons’.  Near the end of the film, Mrs Appleyard, in her cups, laments the loss of Miss McCraw and angrily speculates on her fate:

    ‘I came to depend so much on Greta McCraw.  So much masculine intellect.  I came to rely on that woman.  Trust her.  How could she allow herself to be spirited away?  Lost. Raped. Murdered in cold blood like a silly schoolgirl!’

    The theme of suppressed or thwarted female sexuality is liable to retrospective abuse.  The BFI handout also included an excerpt from the study of Picnic at Hanging Rock in the BFI Film Classics series, published in 2022.  Its author, Anna Backman Rogers, reckons that this ‘haunting’ film:

    ‘… intimates a far more sinister reality:  a violence done to young girls on the cusp of womanhood, the denial and disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people and their land, and the folly and arrogance of white, colonial, European settler culture held in place by pomp, ceremony and arcane ritual …’

    This is pushing it, to say the least.  A single reference in the script to ‘a bloody Abo tracker’ is as much coverage as ‘the Aboriginal people and their land’ get.  In the British Empire department, Michael Fitzhubert’s uncle is a retired English colonel and Mrs Appleyard’s framed photographs include one of Queen Victoria.  Backman Rogers would doubtless claim that these themes are powerfully implicit in the film and/or that their very absence from it is meaningful.  It’s easier to believe that she’s ticking the boxes of misogyny, abuse of Indigenous Peoples and colonialism (and so helping to give ‘wokeness’ a bad name).

    Peter Weir’s handling of the story’s female sexuality aspect is where his preference for ‘atmosphere’ pays off, and impressive because it’s suggestive.  This is apt for a sexual awareness that’s largely or partly unconscious:  inchoate, in relation to the schoolgirls; repressed or frustrated, in the case of the teaching staff.  The narrative also conveys social snobbery and prejudice within the white community.  From the start, Mrs Appleyard disparages the ill-fated Sara, an orphan whose school fees are paid by her guardian.  Albert Crundall, too, as he tells Michael Fitzhubert, started life in an orphanage – along with his kid sister.  It may seem pat when he reveals that the sister’s name was Sara; even so, the fact that the orphan siblings’ paths never again cross makes a social point effectively.  One other thing I’d forgotten about the film:  the Romanian pan pipes are by no means the whole of the music – in fact, there’s a great deal more of Bruce Smeaton’s relatively conventional score.  Weir’s rationing of Gheorghe Zamfir’s contribution recognises how precious an atmospheric resource it is.

    25 February 2025

     

  • I’m Still Here

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ainda Estou Aqui

    Walter Salles (2024)

    Marcelo Rubens Paiva is a Brazilian playwright, screenwriter and novelist.  He’s also a memoirist whose autobiographical works include I’m Still Here; published in 2015, the book is chiefly about his relationships with his parents, especially his mother, Eunice.  Marcelo’s father, Rubens Paiva (1929-71), was a civil engineer, a leftist politician and, after leaving office, a political activist.  A vigorous opponent of the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil since 1964, he was ‘disappeared’ in January 1971.  The book (which I’ve not read) sounds to be, then, a family memoir with an inescapable political context; Walter Salles, working with a screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, successfully integrates those two elements in the film of I’m Still Here.  It’s more vital and inventive as familial rather than political drama but Salles’ screen adaptation may thereby be essentially faithful to its source material.  Eunice Paiva, thanks to the screen time given her and to Fernanda Torres’ fine acting, is unquestionably the story’s heart and heroine.

    Marcelo isn’t the narrator or the central consciousness of the film.  For most of it, he’s an eleven-year-old, who stands out only because he’s the one boy among his parents’ five children.  The family lives a busy, jolly, materially comfortable life in Rio de Janeiro.  Their spacious house is close to Leblon beach, which is where Salles introduces Eunice and the children, swimming and playing in the sun.  Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) decides he wants to adopt a stray dog – a little mongrel terrier – that keeps appearing on the beach.  He runs back to the house, dog in arms, to seal the deal with his father.  Rubens (Selton Mello), in his home office, is discussing with a business associate (Dan Stulbach) the new building project they’re planning.  Rubens’ instant reaction to the dog is a definite no; this is quickly followed, as his son pleads, by ‘What does your mother say?’.  Almost as soon as Marcelo fibs that she said, ‘Ask your father’, he gets his way.

    This scene gives a good flavour of how things work in the Paiva household.  There’s a kind of Godfather-lite contrast between Rubens in his professional and political roles, and as a funny, loving husband and father – lite not just because Rubens is no crime boss but also because he, as paterfamilias, and his wife, as homemaker and social hostess, seem reasonably equal, as well as mutually adoring, partners.  The contrast will nevertheless return and register strongly once Rubens has gone and Eunice learns things she didn’t previously know about the extent of his and his friends’ communication with enemies of the military regime and campaigns on behalf of its victims (mostly through coverage in liberal newspapers outside Brazil).  In the meantime, Salles does a very good job of developing domestic texture.  None of the three younger sisters – Eliana (Luisa Kozovski), Nalu (Barbara Luz) and Babiu (Cora Mora) – makes a strong individual impression but the mixture of details of what the couple or their kids enjoy – backgammon, soufflés, European pop music – is random enough to feel real.

    The pop music is sometimes used as a bridge between the narrative’s two aspects.  One of the records played by the Paiva girls on the turntable at home is ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, banned from radio play in Brazil at the time – as it was in Britain, too.  Otherwise, Salles sharply distinguishes the two countries.   Far-left revolutionary activists kidnap the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, holding him hostage in exchange for the government’s release of political prisoners; in the immediate aftermath to the kidnap, Vera (Valentina Herszage), the eldest Paiva daughter, along with her boyfriend, is arrested at a police roadblock, where they’re subjected to verbally and physically rough treatment.  Soon afterwards, Rubens and Eunice agree to Vera’s going to London for a while, in the company of two of their friends, a married couple who will live in England in virtual political exile.  Vera’s not in the same boat.  Her parents think the extended trip will be an education for their daughter.  But the photos and videos she sends home – in which Abbey Road and its zebra crossing feature prominently – remind us of Vera’s enthusiastic use of her camcorder in Rio.  This was part of what attracted attention and suspicion at the roadblock.

    The bulk of I’m Still Here‘s action takes place in late 1970 and early 1971, exactly the timeframe of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018).  Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro are several thousand miles apart but that’s still an interesting coincidence – at least for British arthouse audiences more used to seeing screen depictions of have-nots in Mexican and Brazilian society, rather than the middle-class families on which Roma and I’m Still Here focus.  Each of the two films depicts, though to very different degrees, a family’s relation to the political reality of their country in the early 1970s.  Whereas Cuarón’s quasi-autobiographical Roma presents the family’s lives chiefly from the perspective of one of their maids, the Paivas’ housekeeper, Zezé (Pri Helena), is a relatively minor presence in I’m Still Here.  She exits the film soon after Rubens’ disappearance:  without her husband’s salary, Eunice can no longer afford to keep Zezé on.  The roadblock is the only episode in the early stages that sees a dramatic collision between a family member and the regime but the latter is always there as a threat.  This comes through in Rubens and Eunice’s conversations with their friends and in isolated sights and sounds.  At the very start, when Eunice is swimming in the sea, she’s disturbed by the noise of a helicopter circling overhead.  A little later, in the background of a street scene, a military truck passes by.  This should be even less remarkable than the helicopter but Eunice notices it uneasily.

    Although you know it’s coming, Rubens’ abduction is a shock – not least because of Salles’ understated staging.   Eunice and Rubens are chatting over a game of backgammon when Zezé enters the room, followed by a man (Luiz Bertazzo) who introduces himself as Dr Schneider; other, armed strangers are visible in the entrance hall.  Asking Rubens to accompany these men immediately to ‘give a deposition’, Schneider addresses him as ‘Congressman’; Rubens says there’s been some mistake – that he’s not been in Congress for some years[1].  Schneider says there’s no mistake but, while Rubens goes to get changed, assures Eunice that her husband will return home soon.  Schneider and a couple of the other men stay in the house once Rubens has been taken away.  The next few sequences capture the crazy, devastating change that has suddenly occurred in Eunice and her family’s lives.  A good hostess to her fingertips, Eunice offers her unexpected guests refreshments.  When she asks Schneider who he is exactly, he replies that he’s a parapsychologist; Eunice quietly repeats the word ‘parapsychologist’ as an incredulous question; the exchange seems to sum up the absurdity of what’s happening.  Late in the evening, she hears from downstairs the noise of table football.  A few days earlier, Marcelo had been playing it with his father; now his opponent is one of Schneider’s sidekicks.

    Within twenty-four hours, Rubens hasn’t returned but Eunice and Eliana, the second eldest daughter, have also been arrested.  Shortly before arrival at their destination, they’re made to wear hoods, which aren’t removed until the pair have been put in separate cells.  Salles understandably feels obliged to cover this traumatic part of Eunice Paiva’s story but it’s hard for these carceral scenes to avoid seeming, beside what’s gone before, relatively generic – even though Fernanda Torres’ reactions to her character’s ordeal are unfailingly true and strong.  The repeated interrogations, the awful sounds of torture going on elsewhere in the place, Eunice’s keeping count of her days in detention by scratching lines on the cell wall – these are all tropes if not cliches of prison drama.  In fact, I‘m Still Here seems to lose something from this point onwards – perhaps as a consequence of converting Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book from a first-person narrative to a more objective form of storytelling:  Salles doesn’t even try to convey a sense of Marcelo’s, or any of his siblings’, horror at the disappearance of their father – and, for what must have seemed to the children a frighteningly long time, of their mother, too.

    There are still surprising and effective moments.  When Félix (Humberto Carrão), the Paivas’ journalist friend and her husband’s co-activist, tells Eunice that, even though they know Rubens has been murdered, ‘we have to keep asking for his release, as if we didn’t know what happened to him’.  When, after Vera’s return from England, another journalist and a photographer arrive at the house to take a picture of Eunice and her children:  the moment they’re instructed to look sad for the photo, they all burst out laughing before compromising on a smile.  Other details, though poignant, are more predictable.  The dog the family adopted dies in the street outside, under the wheels of a car whose occupants are spying on the Paiva house.  Eunice starts sorting through things ahead of the family’s move to São Paulo, where her own parents live, and finds, in a matchbox left in his study by her cigar-smoking husband, their youngest daughter’s milk tooth.  It fell out early in the story; Rubens and Babiu buried it on the beach only for him to pocket the tooth surreptitiously and keep it as a memento.

    The narrative then switches to São Paulo and moves forward to 1996, when Brazil is once again a democracy.  Eunice now has a law degree (she graduated in her late forties) and is a recognised expert in the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil.  She’s midway through a lecture on the subject when she’s called away to take an urgent phone call, from which she learns that, twenty-five years after his killing, the state is now releasing Rubens’ official death certificate.  She’s accompanied to the government building, to collect the certificate, by Babiu (Olivia Torres) and Marcelo (Antonio Saboia).  Now in his late thirties, Marcelo is in a wheelchair, a published author and something of a celebrity:  in the government offices, a young woman employee asks him to autograph her copy of his memoir, Happy Old Year[2].  This part of I’m Still Here seems designed chiefly to impart what-happened-next information about Eunice and Marcelo.  It’s distinguished by the excellent ageing make-up for Eunice (by Marisa Amenta and others) and by Fernanda Torres’ admirably unshowy means of showing the passage of time in Eunice’s gait and gestures.

    Throughout the film, Fernanda Torres, who magnetises the camera, combines emotional depth and subtlety to a degree that puts her performance in a different (higher!) class from those of her fellow nominees for this year’s Best Actress Oscar.  There’s a persuasive logic to her strongly internalised acting:  as the Rio de Janeiro part of the story progresses, Eunice Paiva is increasingly a woman compelled, for various reasons, to hide her feelings as much as she can express them.  Selton Mello (despite his rather unnerving resemblance to Benny Hill) complements her beautifully as Rubens, with his life-and-soul-of-the-party warmth and expansiveness.  By the way, it’s worth noting from the closing photographs of the actual Eunice and Rubens Paiva that the actors playing them are perhaps less conventionally good-looking than the real people were – not something you’d be likely to get in a Hollywood biopic.

    The events of 1996 aren’t quite the end of I’m Still Here.  The film’s last and shortest section is set in São Paulo in 2014, four years before Eunice Paiva’s death at the age of eighty-nine.  Like the opening Leblon beach sequence, the closing scenes centre on a family gathering.  By now, Marcelo isn’t the only wheelchair user; Eunice is too, and we gather from her children’s conversation that she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.  At first, I thought Fernanda Torres’ appearance here was the result of ageing make-up even more ingenious than in the 1996 section; it was only when I saw the cast list that I realised the octogenarian Eunice wasn’t Torres at all but her mother, Fernanda Montenegro.  Salles’ international breakthrough came with Central Station (1998), starring Montenegro, who’s widely considered to be Brazil’s greatest-ever theatre and cinema actress.  Now ninety-five, she’s on screen for only a few minutes in I’m Still Here but it’s long enough for her to prove – without speaking a word – that she’s still a remarkable performer.

    Among her children and grandchildren, Eunice seems mentally more absent than present; Salles then briefly shows her alone in an adjoining room.  A television is on, broadcasting a news report about the findings of the National Truth Commission, which investigated human rights violations during the military dictatorship.  Photographs come up on the TV screen of three particularly well-known victims of the regime, the last of whom is Rubens.  When she sees his photograph, Eunice gives a tiny gasp; without seeming to comprehend quite why, she fills up.  This moment of half-recognition might have been merely sentimental:  Fernanda Montenegro’s artistry renders it a stroke of genius.  (Warren Ellis’s pleasant score for the film also tends to sentimentality but Salles knows when and when not to use the music.)  Walter Salles’ most recent dramatic feature before this one was On the Road (2012).  I don’t know the reasons for his long absence from cinemas but I’m Still Here is good reason to celebrate his return.

    19 February 2025

    [1] According to Wikipedia:  ‘Paiva’s political career began in October 1962, when he was elected Congressman for the state of São Paulo by the Brazilian Labour Party. … After the Brazilian government was overthrown in 1964, Paiva, among other politicians, had his congressional tenure revoked by the military government … Shortly after the coup, Rubens Paiva voluntarily left Brazil for self-exile in Yugoslavia and … Paris … Nine months later, he was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for a meeting with … deposed left-wing leaders … During the lay over in Rio de Janeiro, he left the plane and boarded on [sic] a flight to São Paulo, heading to his house, where his wife and children lived.  Paiva then moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro and returned to work as a civil engineer, while continuing to collaborate with and assist exiled left-wing militants and guerrilla members in Brazil and abroad’.

    [2] Marcelo Rubens Paiva became a tetraplegic at the age of twenty, after jumping into a shallow lake and fracturing his spine.  He eventually regained movement in his arms and hands.  Feliz Ano Velho, published in 1982, tells the story of his accident and partial recovery, and recalls events from earlier in his life.

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