Fernanda Torres Is a Subtle Marvel in I’m Still Here

I’m Still Here. Photo: Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection

The great Brazilian actress and writer Fernanda Torres recently won a surprise Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Dramatic Role, for Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here. Because the film is a fairly limited release and Torres had not been pegged by many as a major Oscar season contender, the so-called upset prompted some discussion around why she might have won. Could it have been because many of the heavyweights in this category were confined to the Musical or Comedy category? Or maybe because other critical front-runners were not even nominated? Did Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman cancel each other out? Did the Globes not take Pamela Anderson seriously enough? I’d like to propose a radical new theory as to Torres’s victory: She won because, at least in this specific case, the voters had actually seen the movie. Fernanda Torres carries almost the entirety of Salles’s political thriller beneath the high-wire tension of her performance.

I’m Still Here is set in the early 1970s, when Brazil suffered under a military dictatorship that had come into power through a 1964 coup d’état — a period of false imprisonment, torture, disappearances, and death. Torres plays Eunice Paiva, wife of previously exiled opposition politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and mother to their five children. Their bustling home, constantly packed with visitors and friends, and their idyllic life, filled with long days at the beach and ice cream breaks and impromptu dance parties and soufflé dinners, serve as both a warm rebuke to and a bit of a bubble from the gathering darkness. The parents understand the gravity of the country’s political situation. They speak to friends who plan to leave the country, and Rubens occasionally takes private calls and passes off envelopes that suggest he’s relaying secret messages. At the same time, when their eldest daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) and her friends get stopped and harassed at a military checkpoint while returning from a screening of Blow-Up, the shock is palpable.

Rubens’s high profile as a politician, however, protects the family from the harsher cruelties of the regime. When plainclothes military policemen arrive one day to take him in for a deposition, he goes quietly, confident he’ll be back soon; Eunice even offers lunch to the burly, severe men staying behind with them. This turns out to be the last time anybody in his family sees Rubens. Soon, Eunice and her daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are also taken in. Peppered with leading questions about communist associations as screams echo in the halls outside the interrogation room, a distraught Eunice offers nothing to her captors. “I’m trying to ensure that you can keep taking care of your family, taking your kids to school, and playing your backgammon,” the man grilling her insists, delivering both the classic justification of oppression (We’re trying to keep people safe) and a veiled threat (We’re watching you and we know what you do). After her release, Eunice works anxiously to locate Rubens and secure his freedom but is told the military knows nothing of his whereabouts. There are rumors of his having escaped. A former prisoner says they saw him. A note in a prison ledger says he once asked for water. But mostly, it’s a wall of silence.

Director Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries), himself a member of a prominent Brazilian family, knew the Paiva kids as a youth, and he luxuriates in the textures and attitudes of the period. Eunice’s home feels lived-in and real, the kids’ rooms dotted with film and pop posters and collages and Che Guevara pictures. The drama creeps in gradually, like a gray poison slowly infecting the air. There have been any number of movies about disappearances under the oppressive regimes of this period, both in Brazil and elsewhere. Salles understands that showing the ways in which life goes on in the face of such evil — or at least attempts to go on — offers a valuable truth into human nature.

The director has also spent enough time working in the U.S. (his much-maligned On the Road adaptation, I’d argue, is underrated, and many vigorously defend his 2005 Dark Water remake) that we may notice shades of Hollywood in some of the film’s easier resolutions. When the Paiva family takes a group picture early on during a blissful trip to the beach, we know that photo will make its way back to us by the end. The constant home movies being shot by the kids will be tenderly screened in the final act. Telling lines and telling moments will tellingly echo in later scenes, bringing things full circle. These elements can feel pat, but they are not grave cinematic sins, especially in a film as ambling and generously paced as this one, with a narrative that is in fact all about the lack of easy resolutions in real life.

And then, of course, there’s Torres, who never quite allows us to witness her fully breaking down, save for a couple of heartbreaking moments that pass, strikingly, in flashes. It’s a marvelously internalized performance, and one that we can’t tear our eyes away from. She keeps the whole picture grounded in an emotional reality that’s all the more heartbreaking for how subtle it is. The more she perseveres, the more we understand her fundamental helplessness in the face of such unimaginable cruelties — and ours.