Spoiler warnings for I’m Still Here
I’m Still Here follows a mother and her family as they deal with the disappearance of the father at the hands of a military dictatorship. They have to cope with his loss, without knowing when or if he will ever return. The impossible question the film asks is: how long do you wait for? At what point do we become merely a memory?
One of the first things to become clear about the family is how they try to preserve the present as much as possible. They try to see the time they spend together as a perfect memory that can last forever, even while they are experiencing it. We see how much they try to hold onto their time together. One of the daughters, Vera, is constantly filming her car journeys and trips to the beach with her hand-held camera. The family’s outings are captured in polaroids, often revisited by the mother, Eunice. They capture their experiences in physical objects to return to: immediately fossilising them as memories. The grainy colour palette, evoking the sand and sun of Brazil in the 70s, makes their surroundings seem representative of the very particular place and time they are living in; a picture would perfectly capture the memory through these colours.
When the father goes missing, the mother continues this idea and tries to preserve the life they had with him. To the younger children, she pretends that he has only gone on holiday and will be back soon. Letting a future without her husband take its course would be too painful for them. Her struggle at this point is one of trying to hang on to the memory of Rubens (vicariously through her children), while realising that dwelling in the memory can only bring harm.
Hanging onto the memory only tarnishes it. There’s one scene, after Rubens has disappeared, where Eunice and her children have ice cream in a shop. The children are enjoying themselves, but Eunice is reminded of an earlier scene where they were there with her husband. She looks around the area, seeing families talking, and cannot help but cry. In hanging onto the past, we are only reminded of what we have lost. In this way, a memory takes on a different meaning. Our memories are not perfect, immovable representations of the past: their meaning is equally formed in the present as well.
Hanging onto a memory only makes Eunice realise their necessary imperfection. Eventually, all the family have to remember their father by are some faded polaroids, and some grainy homemade films. The past happens, and it is never re-experienced. Perhaps, when Eunice was in the shop, it was this realisation that moved her; she will never truly relive that moment with Rubens there, no matter how much she tries to.
It is difficult to live reliant on past memories, yet we are dependent on them. In one scene, one of the children loses a tooth. She and Rubens bury the tooth in the sand, and he says that they will go back to that spot and find it. His trick is that he waits for her to leave and digs it back up. After Ruben’s disappearance, Eunice finds the tooth at his desk. She gives her daughter the tooth, who wonders how her mother found it in the sand. What this scene perfectly articulates is how, in living with someone in our memory, we can bring them back to life. Maybe this is the meaning of the title. Either way, it shows that even in leaving the past behind Eunice continues the spirit of Rubens.
The film makes it clear that Eunice is entirely a product of her past, and carries it with her through her memories. As she is taking the posters off the wall during her packing to leave home, the camera lingers on the wall covered in marks the posters have left. We are forced to carry our memories with us; the signs of the past cannot be erased.
This idea becomes interesting when contrasted against the imperfection of memories. Eunice lives for someone who was taken from her, and eventually all she has to live for is a distant and forgotten feeling. By the end of the film, Eunice has grown older. Her memory is fading. Her only way of remembering Rubens is through aged polaroids. In the final scene, we see her watching a documentary on the military dictatorship. Rubens face, in a grainy black-and-white photo, pops up on the screen. We see recognition in Eunice’s face, but also surprise. It is like seeing a face for the first time. The tragic beauty of Eunice’s life is that it has been influenced so much by Rubens, but now Rubens is merely a picture — some pixels on a screen. We get a sense throughout the film of the particularity of a moment; a moment is gone as soon as it happens, and a memory can never truly recreate it. Eunice’s story seems to be showing us that the only way we can keep going is by thinking of the ones we love, even if we cannot truly grasp them in a thought.
Rubens will forever be lost in the grainy colour palette of 1970 Brazil. The family’s experiences with him and their love of him never leaves that specific and particular moment. When the film cuts to 25 years later, and we see a much more sharp colour scheme and the children grown up as adults, we get this impression. While it is tragic that their love cannot transcend time, it only makes the time they had (in the first hour of the film) more beautiful. The takeaway from this, and perhaps the most powerful message of the movie, is that we should accept and embrace the fact that we will never experience the moment we are experiencing right now again.
