A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

They’re a beautiful family, the Paivas: father Rubens, mother Eunice, and their five children. They live in a nice house, they have nice friends, they obviously love each other. They enjoy days at the beach. Looking at their lives, you would almost not notice that they live in a military dictatorship – almost. They comfort each other when, after the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, the country becomes more threatening – though the oldest daughter, Vera, is sent to London along with friends of the family. Just because you’re safe doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions.

And then Rubens is arrested. And that is the last they’ll ever see of him.

Eunice (Fernanda Torres) is not a political person, but she is obviously concerned about her husband, so she asks the authorities about him – and the result is that she, together with her teenage daughter Eliana, is arrested. The two are separated, and over 12 days Eunice is questioned and tortured about Rubens’ involvements with pro-democratic movements. Finally, she is released, finding out only then that Eliana had only been in custody for one day. Newspaper reports come out claiming that Rubens has left the country and gone into exile, but Eliana doesn’t believe this, nor do her friends. She finds out that her husband has been helping political exiles in secret, and she petitions the government to reveal what has happened with her husband: a habeas corpus petition.

It will be a long time before Eliana is told, officially, what happened to Rubens.

Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here tells the factual story of Eunice Paiva and her fight to learn the truth about her husband’s disappearance. It was the most successful Brazilian film last year, in spite of a boycott by the Brazilian far-right, it was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actress (a deserved nomination for Torres), and it won the award for Best International Feature. I’m Still Here is a film that clearly shares Eunice’s conviction, and it is carried by a fantastic central performance and a strong cast overall. It convincingly evokes the family’s growing horror at the uncertainty of Rubens’ fate: the husband and father is just gone, with obviously fake newspaper articles claiming his flight and exile, followed by rumours that he was killed while under arrest – but the Paivas don’t know. They can only surmise, they can believe, they can even be convinced, but they have no proof, no body, no grave. Only the gap left behind by the person that once was there.

The film is good at depicting the terrible situation Eunice finds herself in, trying to keep a family together in the face of a loss that is all the more corrosive for its uncertainty. It is one thing to believe, even strongly, that a loved one is dead: it is another to know it, and ideally to have a body. And Torres is more than equal to the challenge of making this situation, which few of us know at first hand, believable and real.

And yet: why can’t I praise I’m Still Here without there always being a trailing “… but” in my mind?

At first, I would have said that Salles’ film is held back by telling its story well but without transforming it – yet at more of a distance from having seen I’m Still Here, I don’t think that’s quite right. The film does transform its material, it makes it more universal, but it does so at sacrificing its specificity. This is the case both with respect to its setting and the political issues at hand, and when it comes to the personal story it’s telling. It is well possible that someone who knows Brazil’s history better will find much of the specificity that I missed, but I’m Still Here comes across as a story of a kind we’ve seen before, in other films about disappearances under an autocratic government. Was the Brazilian military dictatorship more or less identical to Argentina’s military junta or Pinochet’s regime in Chile? There is definitely a sense here that Salles is more interested in the universal truths of the terrible situation the Paivas find themselves in, but in doing so his film takes on a generic sheen that the craftsmanship of the filmmaking doesn’t entirely make up for.

For me, though, it is the film’s avoidance of specificity when it comes to the Paiva family that ends up hurting it more. Who is Eunice, other than a dedicated wife and mother hoping to find out what has happened to her husband? Who are the Paiva children? The performances invest these characters with enough of a sense of individuality, but it has to make up for writing that remains quite vague. The film itself doesn’t do itself any favours by moving forward 25 years towards the end, which means that it ends up pretty much ignoring some of the more interesting, specific wrinkles in the story: it skips the period when Eunice and her children would be addressing the day-to-day reality of their situation together. We see the mother making the choice not to tell her children that their father is most likely dead, and we intuit that at least the older daughters may not believe this nor be okay with their mother’s choice to remain silent about the likely, horrible truth of the matter. But I’m Still Here doesn’t seem to be interested in this part of the story: the film fades out and returns to its story in 1996, when Eunice finally receives the official death certificate for Rubens, with Brazil having left its dictatorship behind. It is legitimate for Salles to focus on the weeks following Rubens’ disappearance, but I found myself wanting to see more of what this situation does to the family, over years of not knowing for certain and, it seems, not facing the likely truth together. How do these people continue living in a state that has deprived them of their husband and father? How do they continue living together in the shadow of such a terrible, unavoidable, but unspoken truth? The first epilogue we get, set in 1996, and the second epilogue, showing Eunice, now 85 years old and suffering from dementia, surrounded by her loving children and grandchildren, feel like they are owed to the conventions of the genre, but they do little beyond this.

Salles’ film is undoubtedly good: the filmmaking craft on display is strong, and the performances, especially that of Torres, are brilliant. But it is a film that feels too predictable and even comfortable in its genre: it asks little of its audience other than a sympathy that most likely is there to begin with. Its limitations made me wish for a more idiosyncratic, angrier film, one with a stronger voice of its own. It is an easy film to appreciate and agree with, and clearly the kind that appeals to the members of the Academy, but the story and especially Torres would have deserved a stronger film, and perhaps a more challenging one.