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Mom Knows Something, Too
Though the words of the title most likely refer to the resilience of this Oscar-nominated film’s protagonist, Eunice Paiva (a wide-ranging, powerful portrayal by Fernanda Torres), they might as well be a reference—might as well have been spoken by—the Rio de Janeiro house in which Eunice resides with her husband, engineer Rubens Paiva, and their 5 children. In the first 20 minutes, that house is the stage for a celebration of the family’s vitality, exuberance, and joy, epitomized by Rubens’ demonstrative love for his wife and children and captured by handheld cameras, clips of home movies (it’s 1970, pre-video), and the candid and posed photographs in which the family happily and regularly indulges.
Archival photos and home movies, here of the real Eunice and Rubens Paiva,
show the family's frequent documentation of their joyful lives and a loving couple.
In contrast, the final scene has the camera pulling back as it reveals the same house (“I’m still here”), its once crowded and busy rooms now empty save for the red and white curtains that figure in an earlier scene. Eunice and the children have left for Sao Paolo. Lawyers dealing with tax residency issues like to say that “home” is established by “where the dog is buried.” The Paivas’ dog is buried on the Rio property.
Those early scenes of family affection and gaiety are interrupted by a knock on the door.
The house is sullied, and the story takes an abrupt turn, when those early scenes of family affection and gaiety are interrupted by a knock on the door, signaling the arrival of agents of the authoritarian regime governing Brazil after a 1964 military coup. They take away Rubens (Selton Mell) for “questioning.” A few days later, Eunice and Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), the oldest daughter who remains in the house, are similarly driven off, hooded for secrecy, jailed, and interrogated. Through all this, government apparatchiks—agents of repression and darkness—remain in the house, defiling it by their presence, closing those red and white curtains. The film’s atmosphere emphasizes the melodrama, the dramatic change from brightness and sun on ocean waves lapping against Rio’s shore just beyond the house to the total darkness and sensory deprivation of the hood.
Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are taken away by agents of the regime from their house to prison.
Although the “police” are most interested in the charismatic Rubens, a former member of the Brazilian Congress, he is by no means the narrative’s central character. One of his roles is to exude an optimism bordering on the naïve. Not unlike the Jews of Italy in the Mussolini era, who failed to grasp the depth of the antisemitism of the age and the government’s ruthlessness, Rubens, who has just returned from 6 years in exile, thinks the worst will be over shortly. “You’ll soon be back,” he tells a bookseller friend who is closing up shop and moving to London.
Salles’ perspective is apparent in a brief and seemingly innocuous late scene.
Nor does Brazilian director Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries,” 2004) dwell on the depredations of the regime, though the prison scenes, and their placement in the narrative, were so harrowing that I turned to my reviewing partner and said, “I don’t want to be here.” Salles’ perspective is apparent in a brief and seemingly innocuous late scene. A magazine of international reputation has gathered Eunice and the children for a photo that will emphasize Rubens’ absence and the accompanying family sadness. Refusing the PR moment, Eunice summons Rubens’ playful spirit to evoke the family’s joyful essence. Smiles all around.
Eunice (Torres) takes a last look at the house once filled with people and joy,
now empty, but it's also "still here."
That’s the film in a nutshell: Eunice (Torres is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), the reserved and thoughtful introvert, at peace swimming alone in the shadow of Corcovado, now finding a way to hold her family together, and to retain something of its joie de vivre, in the most trying circumstances imaginable. None of this is easy. The younger children need comforting (“can I sleep with you?”), while a Eunice traumatized by her prison experience needs nothing more than a respite from anxiety (“Mommy needs to sleep”). Efforts to locate her missing husband are emotionally exhausting, and at the same time expose those who might help to life-threatening risk: “Martha, you have to help me. My husband is in danger!” Martha: “Everybody’s in danger, Eunice.” Getting the family out of Rio—out of that now tainted house—requires a less-than-ideal financial transaction as well as the decision, fraught with a sense of abandoning Rubens, to sell a parcel of land that he had imagined as the ideal site of their new home. Throughout it all, Eunice manages to keep Rubens’ spirit alive. When a younger daughter expresses surprise that her mother had found an object whose location only her father should have known, Eunice responds, “I know things, too.”
There is no extended subplot to distract from Eunice’s familial obligations.
To maintain this focus on Eunice requires considerable directorial restraint. The men who remain in the house after taking her husband are not friendly, nor even pleasant. But neither are they obnoxious or (as one might expect) lecherous. Similarly, while imprisoned and interrogated, neither mother nor daughter is sexually violated, as Hollywood would have it. Aside from the family’s acquisition of a stray dog, there is no extended subplot to distract from Eunice’s familial obligations. Years later, her younger son Marcelo (Antonio Saboia)—who wrote the book on which the film is based—appears in a wheelchair, but the accident that caused him to become a paraplegic is never discussed. Nor will we learn what, if anything, happened to Martha. Eliana serves as Eunice’s confidant from time to time; the other children inhabit the film without becoming significant presences. Unlike the Iranian “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (2024), a strikingly similar film that also foregrounds a mother and her daughters, “I’m Still Here,” although based on the real story of Rubens Paiva beginning with his kidnapping in 1971, is intentionally distanced from political details, ideology, and protest movements.
It's all, or almost all, Eunice, working to some extent in Rubens’ shadow, but also heroic, or nearly so: her stolid, determined self, doing her best to locate Rubens, to find out what happened to him, and to make all that public, but even more, committed to making a good life for her kids—helping them at once to remember their father and to forget him—and, as it turns out, making a good life for herself.
He says: A great example of when less is more.
She says: It’s not just Mussolini and the Jews that the film brought to my mind, it is also today’s US atmosphere, reminding me of “First they came for….”
Date: 2024 (the anniversary of the coup)
Director: Walter Salles
Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mell, Antonio Saboia, Luiza Kosovski
Country: Brazil
Language: Portuguese, subtitled in English
Runtime: 137 minutes
Oscar nominations: Best International Feature (Brazil), Best Motion Picture, Best Actress (Fernanda Torres)
Other Awards: 27 wins and 60 other nominations
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