WARNING: SPOILERS

I wish it were less relevant.

Not that I think America 2025 is in the same situation as Brazil 1970. We’re not. But they didn’t think they were in the same situation, either. After Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is taken away, friends assure his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated), that he won’t be harmed. He’s a congressman, after all. Well, former congressman, since his tenure was revoked when the military junta took power in April 1964. With U.S. support, I should add.*

* Is our current situation another case of the chickens coming home to roost?

You’d think more bells would be going off for them. The country was just heaving: new Constitution in 1967, different leader in ‘68, who, in December, per Wikipedia, “gave the president dictatorial powers, dissolved Congress and state legislatures, suspended the constitution, and imposed censorship.” Then that president had a stroke. Then Gen. Emilio Garrastazu Medici took over. He did most of the damage. Damage means: incarcerating people, torturing people, killing people.

So no, the U.S. isn’t there yet. We, like Eunice, are merely surrounded by people who, in Bob Dylan’s words, philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears.

Just there
For a time, I watched “I’m Still Here” as a kind of primer. As homework. And for a time I took solace. Look, even under authoritarianism, life continues. People go to the beach, girls talk boys and play volleyball, friends come over for parties and dancing; couples play backgammon and fathers and sons play loud games of Foosball late at night.

Until they don’t.

Initially, it’s very slice-of-life. What’s the drama? Not much. Other than the impending one, it’s just life. The Paivas have five kids, all girls except for the youngest, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), who, as the movie opens, finds a dog on the beach and works both sides of his parents to keep him. Yes, the eldest, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), and her left-wing friends are pulled over and harassed by the Army after the Swiss ambassador is kidnapped; but she’s going away to London to study, and be safe, and maybe become Mrs. John Lennon. Meanwhile, soufflés are made, and parties hosted, and every once in a while Rubens takes a cryptic phone call or passes something to a late-night door-knocker, but then he resumes being his charming self.

And then there’s a different knock on the door and he’s asked to come along with the men there. He does. “I’ll be back soon, sweetie,” he tells his wife. We never see him again. And the plainclothes men don’t leave. They stay behind and close the curtains. Who are they? Why are they there? That’s the menace of it. Nothing is known and all is accepted. Two of the men are vaguely hippyish, one more militaristic, but they all have a blankness in the eyes. What politeness they have makes them more menacing. They don’t trash the place, they don’t threaten anyone. They’re just there.

At one point, she offers them food, and they eat, and there’s something about the way the men, sitting on a couch or in a chair, set aside their plates with the crumbs on them—not dismissively but also dismissively—that felt so gross to me. Like such a violation. Director Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “Motorcycle Diaries”) filmed the movie in sequence, which Fernanda Torres said helped all the actors get a better sense of the escalating fear and oppression. All of that is translated to us. I think of the Robert Frost line about holding something back for pressure; in these scenes almost everything is held back and the pressure is overwhelming.

And then the mother and eldest remaining daughter are taken into custody. On the way, they’re asked to put a bag over their heads. They do. When it’s removed, half-blind and disheveled, Eunice is immediately photographed. Pop! She’s questioned. A mugshot book is brought out and she’s asked to point out people she knows. She doesn’t know many. Her interrogator is disappointed, disbelieving, angry. She wants to see her daughter. Where is her daughter? Instead she’s put in a small, grimy cell. She’s returned for more questioning and more mugshot pointing. Her husband’s face appears in the book, and then her daughter’s, and then hers. How much time has passed? How many days? She begins marking time on the wall. On the 12th day, she’s released. A guard walks her out, saying he doesn’t agree with what’s going on. But he’s still helping it go on.

The daughter is home—she was released after the first day. It’s late and the kids are asleep, and the mother doesn’t wake them. Instead, she takes a shower and tries to wash it all off, scrubbing until she’s pink.

The family is still watched—a Volkswagen with two men on the other side of the street—and Eunice can’t access money because it’s in the husband’s name. But she still has means. She has a lawyer, connections. They’re an upper-class family with books on the shelves and tons of friends. Some rally, some are distant. She’s looking for evidence that her husband was actually taken because the authorities deny it. That’s how they disappear you. They take you and then say they didn’t take you. A schoolteacher friend can help but won’t. “My husband is in danger,” Eunice tells her. “Everyone is in danger,” the teacher responds.

Solace
When did I realize the family wasn’t fictional? Probably when they skip to 1995 and the boy, Marcelo, is now a well-known author in a wheelchair. The movie is adapted from his memoir of the same name.

By 1995, Eunice is a civil rights lawyer—she got her J.D. at age 48—and that’s the year the government, now civilian, lets her know her husband is dead. She holds up the death certificate before the press and smiles. A different kind of director would underline the moment—maybe give us the smile but the doubt in the eyes, like the final shot of Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill—but Salles doesn’t play that. He knows the Paiva family personally, so I assume he knows. Throughout, Eunice has held that aristocratic stoicism of putting best faces forward. When they leave Rio de Janeiro, she tells her children to smile for the press. She smiles here. The final shot is the family smiling in 2014. Plus I assume Eunice is genuinely happy to get the certificate. She’s happy for the closure. That’s the sadness of it. They leave you in such a state of unknowing that in the end you’re happy just to find out that they killed your loved one in cold blood.

Did we need the 2014 scenes? I might’ve ended with the death certificate. That said, I like the touch of having the elderly Eunice, wheelchair-bound and suffering Alzheimer’s, played by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro. Some part of her awakens when she sees a news report of the disappeared, including Rubens.

“I’m Still Here” is powerful, particularly the incarceration scenes, but it’s a bit too slice-of-life. It’s a family going through authoritarianism and coming out the other side, damaged but resilient. I guess I take some solace in that. If the Portuguese have a word for soupçon, that’s how much solace I take.