‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Fernanda Torres Is Utterly Fantastic in Walter Salles’ Drama

Sometimes, the greatest horrors of history can come from how easily violence and cruelty is enacted by faces you never see. This is what not only allows them to continue carrying out grave injustices, but makes holding them accountable next to impossible.

In Walter Salles’ drama “I’m Still Here,” which is based on the memoir of the same name, this lack of justice instills the film with an agonizing sense of despair. However, Salles also injects it with rich humanity by ensuring the faces of those trying to survive are the ones that we never forget. Just as there is pain from all we don’t see, there is a sense of tragic poetry from following a person who dedicates their life to the pursuit of justice even as it remains in short supply for them.

From the moment we first see Fernanda Torres as Eunice out swimming in the waters off the beach in 1971 Brazil, we feel that the world is getting smaller around her despite her best attempts to build a happy life for herself and her family in it. Without ever putting her up on a pedestal or papering over the harsh realities that she shouldn’t have ever had to face, the film creates a delicate portrait of a life led fighting for justice after her husband is taken from her.

The film, which had its North American Premiere on Monday at the Toronto International Film Festival, grounds itself in the life of one family just as it takes us through a dark chapter of Brazilian history when the military dictatorship ruled with an iron fist, imprisoning and killing dissidents throughout the 1970s. As we get to know Eunice and her family, Salles carves out plenty of space for joy as we observe them being in community with their neighbors and each other.

But there is still a growing sense that things are getting bad as the presence of the military goes from being on the edges of the frame to right in their home where they abduct Eunice’s husband, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman now being targeted for his left-wing views. The scene where he is taken is simple yet shattering as he goes calmly, bidding his family farewell for what they know deep down could be the last time. Eunice is then taken, too, and put through interrogation and intimidation for 12 days before they let her go.

Now left with no answers and still having to raise five children alone while remaining under surveillance, she’ll make it her life’s work to reveal the truth of what happened to those like her husband.”I’m Still Here” then becomes a film about the little details of living under repression and knowing what is hiding underneath it. In Torres, we feel every setback, brief sliver of joy and ultimate loss that she is having to navigate without any support. As misinformation spreads all around Eunice, the facts she needs are almost always out of reach, leaving her life in a near-perpetual state of mourning for a man that the government won’t even acknowledge. In every move she makes, Torres captures this internal emotional tumult with grace, making the way Eunice puts on a smile for a family portrait that’s meant to be sad all the more devastating.

As she goes about her days of trying to maintain some sense of stability for her children, even refusing to speak about her missing husband in front of them, the unfolding tragedy is handled with care by co-writers Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, never once falling into exploitative cliché. The life Eunice lived was not one of neat emotions and narrative progression that could fit into a nice little box. Instead, it’s about the things we don’t think about, the everyday things we must do to carry on. That “I’m Still Here” can capture this sense of uncertainty while also serving as a compassionate character study of a family, with each of her children having distinct moments and challenges alongside her, is a real achievement. When then given life by the constant light that is Torres as we follow Eunice forward in time, it’s that much more quietly devastating.

There are a couple rather significant jumps ahead in time that teeter on the edge of losing narrative focus, but they also provide fitting closure to a story that didn’t just end with one year, two or even a single lifetime. Instead, as Salles shows us, such a seismic loss spans many generations just as it does entire histories that are still being written. We must then always remember the people, their individual stories, and what it was that they endured so that others may never have to do so again.

As the pictures and videos taken by the family echo each other one final time, it shows us the faces that matter most: those of Eunice and all who she loved.

The post ‘I’m Still Here’ Review: Fernanda Torres Is Utterly Fantastic in Walter Salles’ Drama appeared first on TheWrap .