Progressions: "I'm Still Here"

The new Walter Salles film, I'm Still Here, has the feel of a lockdown pet project not unlike Spielberg's The Fabelmans: popular history, a return to the moment of the filmmaker's youth, an attempt to evoke through domestic detail what it was to live in a particular place at a particular time. The difference is that instead of the relatively carefree and liberal-minded West Coast of the 1950s, Salles is revisiting his native Brazil as it was in 1970, under military dictatorship. Meet the Paivas: a large, well-to-do (real-life) family, living visibly untouched by the ways of this world in a spacious ocean-facing property in Rio as the decade begins. Junior clan members hang out at the beach, adopting a dog that wanders onto court during a volleyball game. Dad Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman now working as an architect, busies himself with blueprints for a new Brazil in his study. His wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) leaves the domestics running this household to express mild concern about the eldest of her especially beauteous daughters drifting into student politics. It's all sun and fun, for the most part: period 45s on the record player, Kodachrome recreations of back-garden home videos. Then, having drawn us into this world and these lives with great skill, Salles allows us to feel the rupture when men with guns show up at the family's front door, and proceed to redirect everybody into another film altogether.

I'm Still Here's quiet strength is that, even deep into its final reel, it keeps moving forwards in this way. That initial portrait of haute-bourgeois complacency shades into a tense sketch of a house under siege, the doors and curtains that once let the sunshine in suddenly, definitively closed. Expansive familial togetherness - the fond observation of life around the breakfast table - is overtaken by a mounting sense of division, enforced solitude and private grief. From an ensemble piece, the film develops into a character study centred on Eunice, a moneyed woman forced into the position of becoming first a political prisoner, then a seeker of justice as her husband is disappeared for reasons unknown. Already much-nominated (and sometimes garlanded) this awards season, Torres gives the kind of performance you often see holding not just movies but entire families together, and yet Salles permits her, too, room to move: to progress beyond the loftiness of a society dame to something rueful yet resilient, a Mother Courage obliged to track her husband while simultaneously picking her kids up from school. Here, the film begins to settle closer to the arthouse centreground, but it's always absorbing and involving: it aces the period detail, and Salles ensures all the kids - and even those cast for one or two scenes as thugs or jailers - have a distinct personality, even as he turns his attention to the bigger political picture. Doubtless this is a Brazilian film that could only have been made with the social changes of the last few years, and the defiance in that title extends beyond that of the characters: Salles counters the horrors of the State with basic humanity, and shows that resistance is often a matter of pressing on, of living and growing in the face of those who would oppress you. Subtly, without making undue fuss, I'm Still Here enters into conversation with events north of the border heading into 2025.

I'm Still Here opens in selected cinemas from Friday.