Rubens Paiva was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by armed men on January 20, 1971 for questioning about seditionists to the military dictatorship in power at the time and about a recent spate of kidnap cases involving foreign ambassadors to Brazil, including the representatives from the U.S., West Germany and Switzerland.
He never came home.
In fact, despite his car being found at a prison facility run by the military, there was no sign that he had ever been taken there, and officials denied he was in custody. It was like he never existed. Except that he left behind a wife and five children, one of whom, Marcelo, grew up to write about the incident in his 2015 book "Ainda Estou Aqui".
Salles doesn't sensationalize things. He starts with family activities, the kids interacting on the beach not far from their back door, playing volleyball, finding a stray puppy, while mother Eunice—her full name is Maria Lucrécia Eunice Facciolla Paiva—(Fernanda Torres) floats in the ocean, peaceful and calm, when a military helicopter passes not far overhead interrupting the tranquility. Salles cuts between his footage and recreated 16mm "home movies" that the kids make to document their lives, serving as the movie's "B"-roll. They'll become important later.
It's every day life. Parties, new dog, music, dancing. But, there's an under-current of politics. The party is for daughter Vera who's going off to London for school, partly because she has friends with leftist leanings who are being tracked by the government. Dad Ruben has returned from his own self-imposed exile after some months as a liberal councilman put him on the military's radar. But the ambassadorial kidnappings have intensified the military's presence in the streets and the father is keeping close contact with his friends in the Brazilian Labor Party. It's only a matter of time before that presence arrives at their door-step.
When it does, it comes quietly but assertively. Men in plain clothes and suspicious looks show up one day, armed, while the family is going on about their normal lives. But, the normalcy ends immediately. Ruben drives off in his car with a couple of the guys to be taken in for questioning. The family, particularly Eunice, take a "wait and see" attitude. But, then Eunice and her next eldest daughter Eliana are driven to one of the military prisons for their own questioning. Eunice will stay there for twelve days; Eliana just one. No mention is made of the whereabouts of her husband, and eventually all information about him dries up, and the military denies they have them. Then why is his car still in their lot?
I'm Still Here tracks the family's progress and the stoic Eunice's change from victim to activist and her quest for answers about what happened to her husband. It will take decades of effort as she also raises her children, but always keeping an eye on that empty chair at the dinner table. With her stores of pictures and films she has the evidence that her husband existed, while the government continues to deny his existence or their part in his disappearance. She will fight until she gets the one piece of paper that will expose the whole thing—his death certificate.
It's an amazing movie, much more so for the fact that it seems so ordinary, so focused as it is with the mere act of surviving a trauma, and building a family out of tragedy. Despite the hopelessness of the circumstances, the movie comes out filled with hope.
I've been working on this review since the day I saw this movie in the theater back in 2012, and just never got around to completing it. Life is short. Get things done. In my looking at reviews of the film over the years, I was struck with how so many of them were so personal, dealing less with the film itself than what it stirred in them, detailing the struggles those reviewers had with their elderly parents and their frailties. I notice that I couldn't escape that, either, when I started writing the review way back when.
Let's Face the Music and Dance or The Semi-Quavers in the Fugue State
I've had a bit of experience with the disease named Alzheimer's and a bit with strokes. Basically, it boils down to wires and chemicals. The precision with which one's life is led (or followed) gets gummed up, and the gears start to jam, corrode and fail and the dance-steps we've learned as adults fade away, leaving us mentally flailing and physically incapacitated. Whatever dignity we've cloaked ourselves with unravels and we become as helpless as babes. Every mechanism fails, until we get to the core processes of eating, breathing, beating...which, one by one, give out...and we stop being. Not just being who we are. But just being. I've also had enough experience to know that this process doesn't have a logical, linear progress. You don't "just go downhill" (were it that easy). Things run in cycles, like electric current: you're up, you're down. You have a good day, then boom, your legs go out from underneath you. Recovery takes longer and the "down" days extend and eventually, in one those valleys, you'll breathe your last. We don't have a choice when and how. We don't have any choice. No one born gets out alive. It's the life we have a choice over, and the how of it. Until then, we hang on...for our dear life.
Michael Haneke's Oscar-winning filmAmour ("Love," of course, in translation) starts with a puzzle. Firemen break down a sealed door in a Paris apartment and find the body of Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva), laid out in death, holding flowers, her body ringed with cut asters. As with Caché and The White Ribbon, the first segment gives us a challenge the rest of the movie will answer (but not completely). Why is she there? Why is no one else? Where is her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her main caretaker? What happened? Why this? Why does the daughter (Isabelle Huppert)—who visited often—not know anything about it?
The late Anne Laurent was a music teacher (retired) and an acclaimed pianist. She takes joy in music—as does her husband Georges (also a retired music teacher). They take delight in the accomplishments of their former students, including Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) and, in fact, their last big outing together was to see him perform in concert, although, he is wont to pay a visit from time to time to their cubicled apartment to play for the two of them to their obvious joy and—let's face it, envy—as the two of them, both in their 80's, can't possibly play with the dexterity they used to have. The joy is in the witnessing, not the doing.
The concert is a treat, quite out of the routine of their day-to-day of meals and reading and light chores. But, the night after the concert, at one of those typical meals, where there is the casual conversation—or not—Georges notices that Anne goes quiet and becomes absolutely still, not registering anything, not even when he attempts to get a reaction out of her. She sits there, catatonic, and doesn't revive until Georges is already trying to get help—something she refuses (she's fine!), certainly not any medical attention. And she resists any trip to a doctor's...until she finds that she is quite incapable of pouring herself a drink.
What that "still" incident entailed was a stroke and she has an operation to unblock her carotid artery to prevent anymore of those by increasing the blood-flow to the brain. But, the operation ends up paralyzing her on her right side and she is confined to a wheelchair. The hospital visit was traumatic enough that she makes Georges promise that she will never be sent to the hospital again, and he dutifully agrees.
The strain is wearying, though. Their daughter insists that she be sent to a nursing facility, but Georges will not go back on his word to Anne, employing a nurse three days a week. Anne has a second stroke, leaving her bed-ridden and with dementia. For Georges, the promise he's made to her is inviolable, but it does not make it easy, having to contend with the quality of nursing—some are fine, but there's that one that's slightly abusive that he has to let go—and the gradual shrinking of life that goes with the shrinking of ability.
It is gutting, and I can't imagine someone who hasn't lost someone to a protracted debilitating disease having any understanding of what transpires, like how some viewers who'd never known the reality of "survivor's guilt" trying to comprehend Saving Private Ryan. It's a tough movie to watch, but it's completely understandable if you've been a part of the roller coaster of emotions that rush at you when someone you love is becoming more still. It is not enjoyable, but you appreciate it because writer-director Haneke "gets it." All the conflicts, all the false hopes and truly dark places one goes when you see a love dying. It's a whirlpool that one can fall into if one isn't strong enough to beat back the current.
But, you appreciate that truth. Even if it opens a scarred-over wound.
Belladonna or "The Haggard, Inconstant Splashes of Beauty"
The Great Beautywon this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I haven't seen the other nominees, but the selection of this one seems like a slam-dunk. A long reverie of a writer, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo, a frequent collaborator of the writer-director), who had great success early in his life with his first novel and then stopped. Not writing a follow-up, he becomes a journalist and social critic, judging rather than being judged. And on his 65th birthday, highlighted by an extravagant party, he begins to turn his gaze inward and outward simultaneously and considering his city of Rome, and his place inside (and apart from) it.
Written by Paolo Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello, and directed (rapturously) by Sorrentino, it is a tribute to and reflection on the early work of Federico Fellini, combining the flare and satire of La Dolce Vita and the introspection found in Fellini's later nostalgic films. It is (as per The Maestro) populated by grotesques and beauties and finds value in all, and moves, despite occasional forays into debauchery and the facile, into contemplation and grace. It's an irreverent reverie, and it contains some of the most stunning images I've seen in a (new) film for a long, long time.
Servillo as Gambardella
The movie begins with a quote from Celine: "To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength." A bit melancholy, that. But apt, as Gambardella wanders throughout Rome—the neon-lit party-places and crumbling ruins—amid old friends, mere hangers-on, and new acquaintances, while haunted by memories of his first love (whom he has just been informed, by her husband, has died). Maybe it's that conversation that kicks away his facile observations of the bizarre (like a performance artist he interviews, unsure of her concepts, probably because she's taken so many blows to the head running into concrete walls) and spurs his deep thoughts and sudden introspection.
The past comes back to haunt him. The present is a constant attempt to keep himself engaged. A self-imposed victim of his early success, he is skating through life, coasting on his previous accomplishments, caroming (at an ambling pace) with the strata of friends, lovers, and acquaintances lining his path, glancing off them, but not committing. He's thinking, but feeling very little, except for that time in his youth when he was in love—a tangible memory, the rest a blur.
Sounds like a drag, right? But, it's wonderful—meandering, but beautiful—aided immeasurably by the sad, smart, open performance of Servillo, who is in the film constantly, carrying the thing by himself, and has one of those faces that, try as he might to underplay, exposes every thought passing through his mind. And his cool, appraising looks at the beauties of Rome, and its follies, might well be his own reflection in a mirror of his self-appraisal. Later in the film, after disappointments and passings, brief encounters and longing flashbacks, the film considers and contrasts an ancient nun, saint-like and constant, in a lifetime of dedication without seeking reward, the seeming opposite of Servillo's life, and finds in her crone-like appearance a beauty that runs deeper than appearances.
It might not be for everyone. There's not a lot of action going on. But the images that are there, stately and gorgeous—sometimes puzzling and mystical—make it head and shoulders above what has become standard movie fare. It expands the mind and offers a lovely tonic to a sense of cynicism that pervades most cinema these days. Both in its subject and its presentation it offers something rare in the movies—hope.
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