‘I’m Still Here’: Infusing breath into celluloid

There’s a strange social blasphemy to ‘I’m Still Here’. Suffering, we are told, is a full-time occupation. You must not crave a cup of tea after a loved one dies. You must not laugh too loudly once your house has learned absence. You must not truly live if your husband is abducted by a military dictatorship. But these rules are seldom human.

Set largely in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, under the suffocating grip of military rule, Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning film follows Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), formidable and warm, as she searches for her husband Rubens (Selton Mello, quietly divine), a former Congressman who is taken one night by casually dressed but armed men for “questioning”, and never returns.

The film refuses the convenience of beginning — or ending — there. Suffering does not arrive with ceremony. It seeps.

We first encounter Eunice at Ipanema Beach, content, almost carefree, surrounded by her husband and five children. A passing military truck, murmured anxieties about Brazilian politics — these are the only early fractures.

This becomes a defining rhythm of the film: the intimate unravelling of a family is given full weight, while the political machinery that causes it is relegated to atmosphere, to background noise. Oppression does not announce itself, it interrupts dinner.

When Rubens is taken, the men linger in the Paiva home as if entitled to it. Soon after, Eunice and her 15-year-old daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are hauled in for questioning. Hoods over their faces, tracing the damp walls of a detention centre, faint screams bleeding through concrete: the film sketches the true cost of such regimes, too often reduced to footnotes and numbers.

Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of the Paiva children, the film distinguishes itself through gall and gumption. It could have been a parade of brutality, an easy catalogue of violence. Instead, pain is something that settles quietly, like an unwanted guest who has already unpacked by the time you notice them.

A brief glimpse of blood on a filthy prison floor wounds more deeply than spectacle ever could.

Eunice scrubs her skin raw after returning home. The children — because they are children — continue laughing, living; aware, always, of the unspoken terror hovering just behind them.

Grief finds outlet in miniature dramas: a souffle, the purifying divinity of ocean water, a cigarette left unlit in Eunice’s fingers as the devastating news lands.

Torres metamorphosises into Eunice. Her face hardens almost imperceptibly, grief ageing her in real time, while her eyes cling to resolve. Her finest moments, yes, are the obvious ones; but also her at the bank, or a devastating exchange in which she asks a friend of Rubens — who admits to him and her husband resisting the junta — whether it ever occurred to them that the wives deserved to know.

Cinema often congratulates itself merely for suggesting that its characters existed before and after the film. Here, Salles does something rarer, almost unthinkable: he does not extract a life’s “key moments” and fling them at the screen. He breathes life into the celluloid itself.

Having grown up alongside the real Paiva children, he introduces this family with the same cautious intimacy he must have witnessed — doom is ever-present, but never allowed to dominate the frame.

An elegy scribbled with the rawness of the human condition, ‘I’m Still Here’ is a magnificent work that deserves to be seen, at least once, by anyone who believes cinema can still breathe.