The overwhelming victory of ‘Anora’ in the Oscars was also that of Mikey Madison. The networks were filled with messages about how this gave the reason to the theory of ‘the substance’, losing Demi Moore the prize in front of an actress much younger than her. People forgot three things: 1) You don’t have to “prove her right” because ‘the substance’ is no theory but reality, 2) far from being dream, Madison is great in ‘Anora’, as was in ‘Scream 5’ or in ‘Better Things’ and 3) the contempt for Moore and ‘The substance’ in general is none other Terror But, after seeing ‘I am still here’, a fourth thing appears to add: if there is an injustice in this category, it is that the Oscar for Best Actress has not gone to another of the nominees, Fernanda Torres, whose interpretation bats that of all his companions. Even those nominated in the Oscars last year.
‘I am still here’ supposes the return to the international sphere in style of Walter Salles. The director had already reaped successes in the past with ‘Central do Brazil’ or ‘Motorcycle newspapers’, and that here has finally raised with the Oscar for the best foreign film, which escaped him on those two occasions (the backlash that surrounded ‘Emilia Pérez’ has probably influenced). The film, which has become the most grossing Brazilian film since the pandemic, and the first of that country to win the Oscar, was also nominated for best film and best actress, this last nomination being absolutely incontestable.
‘I am still here’ introduces us to a family in the context of the military dictatorship of Brazil (supported by the US, as Fernanda Torres herself in the promo itself), telling us the real story of the Paiva family, and focusing on Eunice Paiva, the wife of the politician Rubens Paiva. It also does it, adapting the homonymous book that the little boy of the family, Marcelo, wrote through a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, and with a soundtrack that we obviously have to talk: they sound around here, Cesária Évora, Caetano Veloso, Roberto Carlos or Gal Costa, and even the mythical Birkin.
The film has a sober pulse that, although sometimes it is too close to the biopichistoricotm, achieves its own entity in some other memorable passage such as the disappearance. Although it laziness in a somewhat repetitive end, it does not matter to us by having a certain (tremendous) baza. And, instead of resorting to the characterization to age its protagonist, Fernanda Montenegro reappears (considered the great lady of the interpretation of Brazil, and Oscar nominated with Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett in 1998) to play Eunice in her last stage. Doublely special this, because Montenegro is Torres’s mother.
And we return to Torres, because all the roads lead to it when talking about ‘I am still here’: it is the soul of the film, the best with a lot of difference, and delivers an interpretation that could have thrown out of the “Oscavable” in a pejorative sense, and that is the opposite. Torres is visceral when it has to be, but this works even better because what dominates the footage is the subtlety when expressing its emotions, especially in a certain scene of the bar that puts the hair of end, and that is perhaps the best seen this year. The actress considers that the film does not talk about the past, but also about the present: “We are full of fear and anger, and divided, and the idea of a violent state that puts order in the modern disaster is tempting … but we must resist.” He is right and, in case the rational is not enough to understand it, the trip of his character in ‘I am still here’ manages to convey this danger to the public … and also courage and hope.
