Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Valentina Herszage, Maria Manoella, Barbara Luz, Fernanda Montenegro
Runtime: 135 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2025
Reviewer: Ann Rennie
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A mother is forced to reinvent herself when her family’s life is shattered by an act of arbitrary violence during the tightening grip of a military dictatorship in Brazil, 1971.
This film, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, was quietly engrossing and superbly acted. Torres as the wife Eunice who wouldn’t give up her search for her ‘disappeared’ husband Rubens (Mello), a local congressman and architect, was superb.
The film starts in the 1970s with idyllic and grainy shots of the middle-class Rio de Janeiro family on the beach, playing volleyball, laughing, teasing each other, involved in the general shenanigans and normality of family life. Friends come and go easily in a home that is warm and open. There is exuberance and joy in scenes of laughter, dancing to popular local music and eating. There appears to be no clouds on the horizon, except the early ugly scene where their eldest daughter Vera (Herszage) and friends are stopped in their car and treated aggressively by local soldiers.
The main theme of the film is how Eunice strives to keep the family united and doing normal things while unsure of her husband’s whereabouts. Thugs turn up at the Paivas’ home one evening and insist Rubens go with them. He maintains his normal demeanour and kisses his wife as if he is going off to work. He is never seen again. The film tells of her quest to find out how he died and to show that he was killed by military apparatchiks. This film fleshes out the true story of one family who suffered under the military dictatorship which was exercised in Brazil between 1964 and 1985. It is a cautionary tale suggesting that democracy is a fragile thing. We see hints and whispers of careful defiance as friends realise that the military dictatorship uses torture and death as tools of their oppressive and dehumanising trade.
Throughout the film we see Eunice’s steely determination to keep the family together. They are subjected to constant surveillance and there is a particularly poignant scene when the family pet is run over. We learn later that she earns a law degree in her 40s and becomes a champion for human rights in Brazil.
The five children are generally shielded from what is going on. In a moving scene later in the film brother and sister, Marcelo and Vera, ask each other when they knew their father was not coming back. The move to Sao Paulo to the maternal family suggests that this is when it really hit home for the children.
Ultimately, it is Torres’ performance that steals the show. She animates the real Eunice and is elegant, amusing, warm. She is also quietly gutsy as we see when she is incarcerated for 12 days. She has a dignity that will not be bowed. She holds it together for the sake of her family and her belief in justice. Finally, the truth does win out with the official receipt of a death certificate for Rubens some half a century later, stating that he died/was killed on a date unknown.
Thinking back on my own carefree days with my large family by the beach in the 1970s made me realise just how sheltered we were from what was going on in Brazil at the time. Watching this film reminds me that there are other chapters in recent global history we need to know about so that they do not happen again. Rather touchingly, Torres’ own mother Fernanda Montenegro plays the elderly Eunice, wordlessly living in a world of dementia, but still holding onto some of that grit which enabled her younger self to selflessly search for answers as to what happened to her much-loved husband.
Fernanda Torres has been nominated for the best actress Academy Award. Her performance in this film is riveting, truly exemplifying Eunice Paiva’s determined grace under pressure. Perhaps it is Torres’ turn to take the Oscar home.
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