The opening stretch of Walter Salles’ steely but moving family drama set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro throws you for a loop.
Framed in sun-bleached Super 8, kids play on Copacabana Beach, ice creams are eaten, and fresh-from-the-waves teenagers come and go from the elegant home of the Paiva family nearby. Only the odd helicopter overhead disturbs this dreamy vision of middle-class Brazilian life.
But just as you’re settling in for Salles’ sensuous answer to a Paolo Sorrentino film, the veteran Brazilian filmmaker delivers a proper needle-scratch: those choppers are part of the country’s 1970 military junta, a dictatorship hell-bent on tracking down dissidents, including this real-life family’s patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello), a former left-wing politician. Beach football is soon a distant memory as dad is taken away to give a ‘deposition’ while leather-jacketed goons loiter awkwardly in his wife, Eunice’s front room.
Played wonderfully by Fernanda Torres, Eunice is onscreen almost throughout. She’s at the centre of a family drama and political thriller that really blossoms as a survival story – about a dogged woman determined to do her best for herself and her family under brutal circumstances.
Personal and political liberation come together in stirring ways
In that regard, its closest kin is Costa-Gavras’s classic Missing, another film that tackles a fascist coup in ’70s South America through the eyes of fretful family members. And like it, I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.
Like a pat on the family sofa that beckons you over to join the throng, Salles makes affecting use of home video and family snaps. There’s an authentic sense of time and place here (John Lennon and Blow-Up are big in the Paiva family) that nod to an earlier kind of culture war, but maybe also a critique of bourgeois complacency. ‘It’ll pass,’ reassures the avuncular Rubens of the growing political turmoil. ‘Remember the macrobiotic phase?’.
From The Motorcycle Diaries to On the Road, Salles is a great celebrator of liberation, both personal and political. The two come together in stirring and poignant ways here. You can feel the shadow of a contemporary Brazilian leader, Jair Bolsonaro, hanging over it. Worryingly, Salles seems unlikely to be short of further inspiration any time soon.
I’m Still Here premiered at the Venice Film Festival.