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.
