‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Walter Salles’s Personal Chronicle of a Political Disappearance

There are traces of something genuinely exploratory in Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, the director’s first narrative feature in 12 years and certainly one of his most personal. Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir, the film traces the effects that the 1971 state-sanctioned kidnapping and murder of the author’s father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), have on his immediate family, especially his beleaguered wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who was partially unaware of Rubens’s political dissidence. In the background, the gears of the Brazilian military dictatorship grind ever onward, and there are continuous suggestions of vaster, more clandestine intrigue. The film’s perspective, though, remains firmly aligned with Eunice’s.

Salles knew the Paiva clan personally, having befriended middle daughter Nalu (portrayed here by Bárbara Luz) as an adolescent in Rio de Janeiro. The family’s household, where much of I’m Still Here takes place, is rendered with the sort of specificity indicative of memory, from the record collections to the color of paint on the walls—and the bricolage of posters adorning them. It’s evidently a result of painstaking attentiveness and care, evoking well enough the particular lifestyle and aesthetic interests of a tightly knit, period-accurate family unit. Salles wants to offer us a seat at the proverbial dinner table, immersing audiences in the day-to-day routines of people he himself knew so that their loss, when it does eventually come, registers as one’s own.

This aim isn’t uncompelling, but Salles’s reconstruction amounts to little more than a dollhouse. I’m Still Here’s affection for its subjects, though tender, is largely hagiographic. The film has trouble excavating any coarse humanism from this decidedly human story, painting the family, Eunice especially, in broad, uninspired strokes. It has little interest in them as people, and every interest in determining how history should remember them.

To its credit—and later, its detriment—the film is very patient. Plenty of time is spent with the family prior to Rubens’s abduction, beginning with a sunbaked beach day and moving unhurriedly through scenes where they play foosball, host parties, and make plans for a new home they’re building. Early on, one of Rubens and Eunice’s five children, Vera (Valentina Herszage), is accosted by soldiers at a military checkpoint on her way home from a movie (Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, an unsubtle indicator of I’m Still Here’s preoccupation with images as a form of documentation). This encounter puts the family slightly on edge, but on the whole, what we witness is a snapshot of happy people living happy lives.

When agents of the state come to whisk Rubens away, Eunice emerges as the film’s definitive lead. She, too, is taken in for questioning shortly after, resulting in I’m Still Here’s most immediately compelling sequence. Days pass as Eunice is interrogated and re-interrogated, all the while catching brief glimpses of the torture being administered to unknown, unseen figures in adjacent rooms. The sequence is moody, shot in inky blues and blacks by cinematographer Adrian Teijido, and provides Torres ample opportunity to shift into a more agitated register.

Sadly, not even Torres’s spirited performance wrests Eunice from the trappings of Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega’s lugubrious screenplay, which can’t seem to imagine her in relation to anything but her depersonalized roles as wife and mother. The decision to structure I’m Still Here around Eunice’s reaction to its central tragedy, with all the limitations in scope that implies, is an inspired one, but very little insight emerges from it.

As a good wife, Eunice dutifully investigates Rubens’s disappearance, and as a good mother, she holds her head up high for her children. Never does Salles’s film sink its teeth into what it means for Eunice that these roles have so fundamentally changed, opting instead to sand her down to a symbol. Even with its pointed efforts to swap out a procedural for a character study, I’m Still Here struggles to reveal anything that a Wikipedia article couldn’t.

As the film bores on, it plays the biopic hits with tiring frequency. There’s a flash-forward, then another. Characters discuss the last couple of decades among themselves, reflecting on how much has changed. There are hints of more interesting stories at the margins here, like Eunice’s career as a law professor and indigenous rights advocate, and her resistance to telling her children about Rubens’s death even after confirming it herself. But hints they remain.

Late in the film, Eunice, contending with dementia in her old age, catches a television broadcast about kidnappings carried out under the dictatorship, and has a pang of recognition. But I’m Still Here tips its hand earlier, when, after announcing that the family will be uprooting their life in Rio de Janeiro and moving to São Paulo, Eunice privately watches an 8mm reel of that day at the beach so long ago. The blurred, grainy images imply friction between memory and reality, a rupture stemming from incalculable loss. But we see nothing here that we haven’t already: a happy, picture-perfect family, their bonds complicated only by outside forces.