THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR

I'm Still Here 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱 5 Maryellens

Sony Pictures Classics

One of Brazil’s most celebrated directors, Walter Salles (Central Station, Motorcycle Diaries), is out with his most sprawling and ambitious film yet, which tells the story of the “disappearance” of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman, in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, and the subsequent transformation of his wife, Eunice, into a civil rights legend.

The movie’s first hour feels a lot like Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander or Fellini’s Amarcord—a leisurely journey into the richly detailed past to visit a big happy family. It starts in a gracious home, right on the beach at Ipanema, where Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice (Fernanda Torres) are raising their four daughters and one son and enjoying a lively social life in Rio’s intellectual circles. Salles himself visited the Paivas’ home as a child and drew on those memories to weave this lively, multitextured tapestry.

After agents of the country’s right-wing dictatorship abduct Rubens, Eunice faces a series of impossible choices. What should she share with the children? Are they even safe? How is she going to pay the bills? These straightforward concerns—all of them nightmares—are soon supplanted by an even larger challenge. Eunice and her children go from playing volleyball on the beach to mobilizing for battle.

Torres gives a towering performance and should definitely score an Oscar nomination (as her mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, who has a cameo here, did for Central Station). With right-wing nationalists edging into power around the world, I’m Still Here poses a tough question. How would your family react when that knock on the door comes?

The film comes out in the U.S. on Feb. 14. A version of this review first appeared in Bloomberg Pursuits on Oct. 19.