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It’s all in how Fernanda Torres carries herself in her Oscar-nominated flip in I’m Nonetheless Right here – shoulders excessive, forehead tensed however not knotted, and jaw jutted barely ahead. She seems to be as proud and stylish as a marble bust. The world round her character, Eunice Paiva, mom of 5 and spouse of former congressman Rubens, has collapsed into an unsightly refrain of helicopter blades, military vans, and stomping boots. It’s 1970, in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil is underneath a army dictatorship that might final till 1985. But she is going to stay indefatigable.
Rubens has been ferried away by males in informal leather-based jackets with weapons at their hips to offer a “deposition”. That’s what they are saying. His household won’t ever see him once more. It is going to be 25 years earlier than Eunice is ready to maintain his dying certificates in her fingers. These are all actual folks and actual occasions, intimately captured by director Walter Salles in his first narrative characteristic since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Highway.
I’m Nonetheless Right here is fascinating much less for the way it displays biography than autobiography. Whereas it’s formally an adaptation of the memoir Ainda Estou Aqui, written by Eunice’s son, Marcelo, Salles himself was childhood associates with the youthful Paivas and a frequent visitor of their dwelling. And whereas it’s by no means consciously framed as such, there’s one thing of a kid’s eye view to cinematographer Adrian Teijido’s sun-dappled photos of familial bliss – of children fussing over the stray terrier they discover skittering throughout the seaside, or stuffing their faces with ice cream at a neighborhood parlour.
On the dinner desk, the digicam stays low, peering up over plates and serving bowls and towards grownup conversations. Editor Affonso Gonçalves continuously cuts in sequences shot by eldest youngster Vera (Valentina Herszage) on her handheld Tremendous 8 digicam, which turns into an essential technique of communication when she’s despatched off to London for her personal security.
The entire movie appears haloed by motherly affection, taking in Eunice’s actions as if she had been a queen overseeing her area. No soufflé is ever allowed to stay to the pan. And no curl of her Jackie Kennedy bob is ever allowed to bounce out of place. The movie ends, poignantly, on an older Eunice. She’s performed by Fernanda Montenegro, the primary Brazilian actress nominated for an Oscar, for Salles’s Central Station (1998) – and Torres’s personal mom.
That delicate embrace of concord isn’t solely how I’m Nonetheless Right here begins, however the way it continues after Rubens’s pressured disappearance. Eunice’s defiance in opposition to the regime takes the type of pleasure. “You kill one individual, you condemn the remaining to everlasting psychological torture,” she later tells the press. Nevertheless it’s by understanding how that grief is merely one other assault on freedom that she’s motivated to inform her youngsters to maintain smiling in images, to maintain consuming their ice cream.
When evil does make itself recognized, Salles captures it with the coded cordiality that authoritarianism likes to decorate itself up in. Delicate-mannered males come to shut the curtains within the dwelling, to loom silently on the edges of the movie’s frames. Eunice doesn’t shrink away. She gives them one thing to eat. When she’s taken away to be interrogated (“routine questions”, they are saying, because the digicam turns down in the direction of the blood stains on the ground), she doesn’t give them the concern they crave, or the anger they want as an excuse. Torres, in her masterfully managed efficiency, gives up all we may probably require.
Dir: Walter Salles. Starring: Fernanda Torres, Fernanda Montenegro, Selton Mello, Guilherme Silveira, Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Cora Mora. 15, 138 minutes.
‘I’m Nonetheless Right here’ is in cinemas from 21 February
