How do cinema goers find out about films? They follow the online publicity and wait for the film to appear at a movie house near enough to them. Thus it was that I went to see 'I'm Still Here', the Walter Salles directed French/Brazilian film depicting life under the fifth Brazilian republic from 1964 to 1985, and later.
The fifth Brazilian republic started from a military coup that was supported by the U.S. government with where the military said they would not infringe civil life, and whilst they did change presidents every five years, the president was always a right wing figure from the same cabal/party. Thus whilst the film starts in the era of family fun and expanding middle class hopes, where mention of politics is hushed away and politics is something men talk about away from women and family, with the arrival of President Emílio Garrastazu Médicir for his five year term, 1969-1974 a crack downs against civil liberties happens against a background of 'left wing gangs' [given the military character of the government how could they be in anything other than gangs?] abducting figures like the Swiss ambassador to Brazil. We see this reported in the film, where focus is on the male heads of households doing their civil rights duties of tracking those seemingly randomly arrested and imprisoned with out habeas corpus, out of sight of the family, and the mother changing television channels, to divert the children from the chilling reality that was on the horizon for all of them. This let the children believe the family was a safe place, and the future would be safe as well.
But in January 1971 a former senator, Rubens Paiva, is arrested at night from his family home, and the family are placed together under house arrest. The film changes tone from cheerful to sombre with great felicity as the political blackout, where, to adapt a phrase, the first rule of a military coup is to not discuss that it is a military coup. As if discussion of it is to invite getting on the wrong side of the authorities when the authorities dislike citizens knowing what being the right side them is. The actress Fernanda Torres pitches her depiction of Eunice Piava, whose husband is missing but hopefully still alive but might be dead, perfectly. She shows a quiet resourcefulness, as the mother of her four children, with no regular means to an income. The mother is arrested herself and shows stoicism and circumspection when interrogated, and when she is held in a cell. Her daughter is held in a different cell and neither knows where the other is, or where the husband/father is. The maid has to hold the children who remain at home under house arrest together whilst the policemen who stay in the house make the atmosphere murky with how they skulk around.
Eunice has to mark the walls to know how many days she has been in her cell, it turns out she was kept three weeks but kept bad count with the scratches on the wall. But she held herself well and gave away nearly no details about who might have been a communist whilst being interrogated with the sounds of torture audible in the background.
When Eunice and her daughter returned to the house and the secret police left the house and the family alone, that first hug the family shared on screen looked haunted, the body language between them was that frozen. It looked like ghosts sharing in a group hug.
What happens from that reunifying hug onward was a long slow construction of a new normality, missing the most vital facts of the whereabouts of their father. The secret police stay in their police cars, parked on the street. The mother is the only one permitted to use the phone and she knows that the line is tapped and that people that the children would be better off not knowing about might ring.
Where does the film go from there? The family adjusts and Eunice has to be both father and mother without even the maid to help her-there is no longer the money to keep a maid who is a friend to the children. Eunice has to both the one set firm boundaries and the one to make sure those boundaries are not crossed, particularly when secret policemen sit in cars on the road outside the house.
But the family knows that the whole of Brazil is living a strange double reality where the news the family get on television is different from the news reports in internationally reputable newspapers, the family knows it is Brazil in microcosm form where for seeing life close up the inconsistencies and adaptions that have to be observed to get by week to week month make normality seem edgy and dissonant. The balance between life being about grace, versus life being about the pressure to compromise, yield to the government on terms that do not add up is there. As this goes on and on, and on, like the military crack down itself the dog the boy owned is let out onto the street unawares of the family. Cue the screech car wheels and the sight of a dead dog whilst the no-so-secret-police glare at the family retrieving the body of the dog. The upside was the chance to grieve as a family as the whole family buries the dog in the garden.
Oddly, the president of the fifth republic is only depicted once in the film, when Eunice looks up at his portrait on the wall in the bank as she attends to straighten out the family finances. Other than than that one scene he remains an invisible threat. But this twilight zone of a political regime does not last forever, and Eunice prepares the family to move from their luxury villa complete with secret police surveillance to a large flat nearer their extended family in a another city where the families relative anonymity helps them breath easier.
I am going to end this review here, by adding that the family prove resilient for others, well beyond themselves, as well as for each other, and the 'twilight zone' of the memory of life under military rule, suspected of being either communists or communist sympathisers recedes into the past. If you like family saga films that do updates, 1985, 1992, 2000 etc you will like the last half hour of the film. If you think that these updates feel like false endings that only dilute the resolve shown before on the screen, than be patient with the film, it will reward you with the end.
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