New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

NAOMI WATTS, BILL MURRAY IN THE FRIEND

SCOTT MCGEHEE, DAVID SIEGEL: THE FRIEND (2024)

Of grief and a Great Dane

This is a book by Sigrid Nunez that won a 2018 National Book Award. The story explores grief for a friend through the inheritance of his dog, a 180-pound Harlequin Great Dane called Apollo. He is a pedigreed animal whom the friend found abandoned and had become very dear to him. The preparing and casting of the great Dane Bing for this role I'd already read about in a New Yorker article and is a story in itself.

Essential to the film is also the human cast, Naomi Watts as the protagonist, iris, and Bill Murray as her friend Walter who takes ill and suddenly commits suicide. Watts never ceases to be engaging and real. She gives her complete attention to a role that is detailed and specific but not particularly spectacular. This film is all about nuance, and it requires patience of the viewer. Nothing flashy happens. Murray appears only briefly but we don't need a lot of Bill Murray to believe Walter is a real and lovable man. He is the ultimate veteran and his turn is witty, natural, and complex.

The main interest is Iris' difficulty in coping with her inheritance of Apollo. She didn't expect to be chosen and the news from Walter's widow and third wife, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) is a surprise. She is more a cat person. Anyway it's academic because her rent-controlled apartment, which has been in the family before her and by the looks of it is in a beautiful building in lower Manhattan, does not allow pets.

Nonetheless Iris gets Apollo from the pound and brings him to her apartment. He plants himself on her bed and takes it over. He won't eat at first and it emerges that he is grieving. "How do you explain death to a dog?" asks Barbara repeatedly, but you don't need to: obviously Apollo knows Walter is gone and feels the absence more acutely than anyone since he was his whole world. Apollo is a quiet, mournful presence, and writers have delighted in saying that Bing is the best actor in the film. Let's not try to compare human and animal performances. Naomi Watts is quietly fantastic.

However successfully the film captures the book, it works on its own very well.There are not the immense complications, say, of Schrader's adaptation of Russell Banks in the still-born Oh, Canada. The magic of the tale is how the practical details of taking care of an absent friend's unwieldy pet become seamlessly interwoven with the process of grieving. This is blended with other details of Iris' life as a writing teacher and writer (like Walter), flashbacks to show or explain Iris' relationship with Walter (only momentarily ever anything but friendship, but intense on that level), and other friends and places. An important figure is the super of Iris' building (Felix Solis) who must convey the bad news and the good news.

Cate Erbland of IndieWire calls The Friend "the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days," and I'll go along with that. This is an unusually deliberate exploration (two hours) of what might normally work better in a short book, but it takes time for Apollo (Bing) to emerge, for Iris' relationship with him to stabilize, and for the subtle elements of grief and reconciliation in the story to marinate. Recommended, and not just for dog lovers.

The Friend, 120 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at Toronto and the Hamptons, and New York, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 69% (based on 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE IN HARD TRUTHS

MIKE LEIGH: HARD TRUTHS (2024)

Starts hilarious and ends deeply sad

This brilliant film by the great Mike Leigh starts out hilarious and ends up deeply sad.

These are black working class Brits who live in bright, shiny new houses in a clean neighborhood. In fact cleanliness is an obsession of the protagonist, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose outspokenness about finding everything and everyone unsatisfactory is, initially, killingly funny. Leigh operates on the edge between parody and tragedy.

Leigh works as he has often done through a series of detached skit-like scenes with some different characters and some recurring ones. They visit a job workplace, a social gathering, home, a psychiatrist, a dentist, and a hairdresser's and we meet different people, usually in the company of Pansy. Some of the others tend to express themselves with the rancid forthrightness of Pansy, but none of them are as angry and unsatisfied as she is or so outrageously provocative and aggressive in speech. Words are a weapon with which she lashes out in every direction, indiscriminately.

Pansy goes over the edge, but Leigh chooses to keep her safe. No matter how much she insults her husband or people she meets, she gets away with it. But then on a visit to family, her unhappiness and desperation come to a head and the whole group is affected, especially her husband Curtley (David Webber). Later, it appears their desperate and aimless 20-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) may fall into a chance of normality when, while he sits in a great square of London, a young women sidles up to him.

Leigh's writing is blindingly brilliant here, ruthless, extreme, and absolute. It may seem to push the very limits of the surreal. But it also adeptly captures the vernacular so each line springs to rapid life. And strange though it may seem, there are moments here that awakened vivid memories of desperate moments of my own youth, so clearly Leigh touches an emotionally valid nerve.

No other filmmaker working in English today comes this close to the edge. Recommended for Mike Leigh fans and for the emotionally hardy. This is one of Leigh's best late efforts but not a warm one.

Hard Truths, 97 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024. Shown also at the NYFF where it was screened for this review Oct. 2, 2024. Also shown at San Sebastián. Metacritic rating: 87%.A Bleecker Street release.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHAO TAO AND LI ZHUBIN IN SCENE REWORKED FOR "ANGUISHING VIOLENCE" (DEBORAH YOUNG) IN CAGHT BY THE TIDES

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES 风流一代(Jia Zhang-ke)

CLIP FROM THE FILM

A kind of summation reviews many themes while resuming a favorite storyline

Jia Zhang-ke's symphonic, career-summarizing new film Caught by the Tides begins with a pre-title interlude in an enclosed space where women, shyly, then enthusiastically, show off their singing skills, then join together. This is followed by an enthralling sequence evoking Chinese collectivity, a vast space, singing, crowds gathered together: the editing has a brilliant, swirling flow. It's enthralling.

Then, we begin a return to the theme of a failed twenty-year-old romance where a man goes off in search of his fortune, featuring muse Zhao Tao as the lover left behind who belatedly goes off on a journey in search of him. He sends her a message saying he has gone to another province where he hopes for more action and promises to come back for her when he is successful. He never comes back. Long later they meet again. Neither has done well, despite the country's enormous growth.

The storyline encapsulates the time of most tumultuous change in China, with the Three Gorges dam and the displacement of millions of people that also includes Jia's career and growth as a director depicting all that.

In fact the way the career and the country and the story encapsulate, embrace, and illuminate each other in Caught by the Tides is so cosmic one can imagine blissfully watching this ilm forever, though it may also make one want to go back to the raw freshness of Jia's first few films, which are favorites of fans like me.

The plot line begins 2001, in the northeastern Chinese city of Datong. A working class woman named Qiao Qiao (longtime muse Zhao Tao) has a romantic relationship with her manager Guao Bin (Zhubin Li) as she hustles to make a living as a singer, model, and club girl. Guao Bin leaves Datong to try earning his living in another province. When she goes looking for him years later, her journey takes her through regions being displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, as well as Guangdong Province. We see Guao Bin trying his hand at various businesses, including involvement with a shady politician. When Quao finally finds Guao Bin, she breaks up with him. Later in the covid era they reunite, considerably aged. This trajectory may reflect Jia's view of the fortunes of much of the Chinese population, where individuals have not fared as well as the economy.

When the film debuted in Competition at Cannes Deborah Young called it "dazzling" in of The Film Verdict, though she observed that "its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story." Indeed story takes second place to the film's symphonic collectivity; but there has always been that quality in Jia's work.

Jessica Kiang in Variety called the film "an epic, lyrical drama that is both Chinese master Jia's career-retrospective reinvention and a defining portrait of modern China." That is indeed how the film looks, though the portrait is very miuch Jia's own, since it relies on many images from his own bank of them. Bradshaw awarded Caught by the Tides 4/5 stars and offered ut high praise. He notes that the theme will sound familiar to Jia fans"and that the encapsulated modern Chinese history includes breathtaking economic progress alongside some "very old-fashioned state coercion" as well as the successes of "mobster-businessmen," the "patriotic ecstasy" of Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympics, and all the "unacknowledged pain" caused by the displacement of communities for the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam covered by Jia's Golden Lion winning 2006 Still Life.

Bradshaw finds "a kind of epic power " in the final scene when the aging couple reunites.

Deborah Young that the whole film is constructed from scenes and outtakes of previous work, which can be done because those two actors played related roles in [I]Unknown Pleasures, Still Life[/I, and A Touch of Sin. Young suggests Jia's films have always been n "strong on music and wordless images but thin on storylines, pacing and emotional expression." Well, that is not always true. Even if nothing has ever been quite up to Jia's first four films, yet he remains a powerful and distinctive filmmaker whos is central to contemporary Chinese cinema, and that is resserted here, even though for all the impressiveness of this new compilation, we look forward to a new direction.

Caught by the Tides 风流一代 (Fēngliú yīdài: "Romantic Generation"), 111 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 18, 2024, showing also at Munich, Two Riversides (Poland), Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, Busan and at New York, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: ̶8̶0̶%̶ Now 88%.

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT CASSEL, DIANE KRUGER IN THE SHROUDS

DAVID CRONENBERG: THE SHROUDS (2024)

Excruciating, precise necrophilia may not be your thing; it's not mine

In Competition at Cannes. The titular cloth is fitted with dozens of tiny cameras so the bereaved can watch the decomposition of the beloved in detail after he or she or they is or are buried. The purveyor of these shrouds is one Karsh (Vincent Cassel, standing in for the director), who runs a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached. Diane Kkruger plays the bereaved Karsh's wife, her sister, and a virtual AI avatar. Giving it his respectful but reserved rating of 3/5 stars, Peter Bradshaw in his GUARDIAN review describes THE SHROUDS as another example of the filmmaker's "eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief," with his "now very familiar Ballardian fetishes," and lots of "intriguing and exhausting" details in the elaborate plot-line. Hollywood Reporter's Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski talk about how respectful the Cannes audience was, and reserved. The director is 81; his own wife died six years ago. They say Cronenberg's is seventh film in Competition at Cannes, and his body horror genre "casts a long shadow on the Crousette," reflected recently ih Julia Ducournau's 2021 Palme d'Or Titane and this year in Coralie Fargeat’s' The Substance, "one of this year’s hottest competition titles," starring Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley.

Cronenberg has gone very dark before: think of Dead Ringers. But in a man of 80 thinking about death this took on a special grimness and sadness. A little too close to home, shall we say?

I can only say I wish I had seen The Substance instead. It may be relatively frivolous and simplistic, but while watching The Shrouds I felt I was choking for air and enclosed in darkness. A stifling work that felt interminable. The idea that anyone would want to watch their loved ones decompose in the grave through a hi-tech visualizing device seemed as far-fetched as it was repulsive. The absorption in elaborate precision about details of the whole business became excruciating. The efforts of this distinguished cast were wasted on me - though Vincent Cassel certainly has an elongated, gray, muscular, sepulchral look that is memorable and appropriate. Not recommended.

The Shrouds, 119 mins., debuted at Cannes May 20, 2024, showing also at Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, Saõ Paolo, Hamburg, and New York, where it was screened for this review.
Metacritic rating: 57%.

[Chris Knipp]

JULIANNE MOORE, TILDA SWINTON IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024) NYFF Centerpiece Fiim

SOURCE

Almodovar turns to end of life for a first feature in English drawn from Sigrid Nunez

The Room Next Door is Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language feature film. Last year he showed at the NYFF a thirty-minute film in English, Strange Way of LIfe/Extraña forma de vida,. This is the second of two Sigrid Nunez novel adaptations in this year's NYFF. The other is Scott McGehee and David Siegel's low-keyed, engagingThe Friend, with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. A Time Magazine article talks about the author in relation to the two films, which debuted at Venice and also showed at Telluride and Toronto. (The subjects relate; she is pleased with how they turned out.)

The Friend has a light touch. It approaches death and grieving, you might say, by indirection. Almodóvar, and Nunez, on the other hand, are approaching death more directly. The trouble in this case is the Spanish filmmaker's glossy, beautiful, artificial approach, arguably heightened by his working in a second language. There is no question about the beauty and elegance of The Room Next Door, or the delicacy of the performance by longtime Almodóvar friend John Turturro as Damian Cunningham, a man who at separate times has been the lover of both women.

But despite the glamorous actresses and the beautiful settings and cinematography, including a showcase rented modernistic house in the country where Martha (Tilda Swinton) goes to end her life accompanied by Ingrid (Julianne Moore), and an initial meeting at Lincoln Center, a place dear to the director for many years of recognition, The Room Next Door falls short of the kind of depth and conviction the Spaniard achieved in his searching 2019 life summary Pain and Glory,, or masterful earlier films he made during the Movida Madrileña period like Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), or things of beauty like All About My Mother (1999) and Talk to Her (2002) - one could go on and on.

The Room Next Door is based on What Are You Going Through, Nunez's novel about euthanasia, where (spoiler alert) Ingrid, a good friend (Moore) is prevailed upon to help Martha (Swinton), an older woman and former American international war correspondent with terminal cancer. Ingrid is to do this simply by being present, as Martha ends her life using an illegal pill she has acquired via the Dark Web. In the book Nunez references Chantal Ackerman's No Home Movie, which approaches a similar subject, in documentary form, and so you could say Nunez was thinking of, even inspired by, a film when she began her book.

Almodovar explains his movie also focuses (more indirectly) on a "very imperfect mother" (Martha) and "her resentful daughter" who are tentatively rekindling a relationship that has been suspended for some years. In the background there is this unseen daughter, who appears only toward the end (surprise novelty casting).

Almodóvar this time translates his lifelong fascination with mothers (one of his best films was "all about" his) and with women (another depicted them "on the edge of a nervous breakdown," or "al borde de un ataque de nervios") to English, and the American idiom - except that Tilda Swinton isn't American. But she has played a mother twice for Joanna Hogg, incliuding, in The Souvenir: Part II, with her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as her daughter. And there isn't much the versatile Tilda hasn't played or can't play. However, as this brash American, she is less at lease than with Joanna Hogg, and her Martha performance with its brash American accent at times seems pushed.

The biggest flaw with The Room Next Door is euthanasia, which leads Ingrid into a relationship with Martha that is not only uncomfortable (closer friends have already refused) but illegal. It seems slightly implausible that a sometimes estranged friend could ber lured into something not only unpleasant but risky, and the glossy, pretty affair Almodóvar makes of it at the handsome country retreat. All this has been initiated when Martha has learned that the experimental treatment she had agreed to turns out not to be working, and her cancer is spreading to her other organs. The film seems to forget this as Martha and Ingrid, out in the country, go on enjoyable outings and revel in the beautiful setting and nice weather.

After the death there is a hassle with the local police. Suddenly this seems perhaps the most important part of the film, but it is rushed through. This invites comparison with François Ozon's witty, slightly oddball, but also very practical 2019 film about this same subject Everything Went Fine (Tout s'est bien passé), which approaches euthanasia in France. There, a practical, legal solution is found, by going to Switzerland, where it is legal. In The Room Next Door no legal solution is found, and the fact that it is not isn't dealt with satisfactorily. Morally and legally the film leaves things up in the air.

This is not to say that Almodóvar doesn't ponder interestingly on end of life issues and that this film isn't beautiful and sometimes well acted; it does and it is. But the foray into another language (at age 75) is, as often happens, a dilution and a distraction as well.

With this Centerpiece Film at New York, Almodóvar nonetheless sets a record here with his fifteenth NYFF selection, nine of which have been featured "gala" presentations. The Spaniard has had a glorious and friendly history at Lincoln Center which is being celebrated this season with his reception of the Chaplin Award. Almodóvar's New York debut was in 1988 with Los mujeres al bordo...etc.(NYFF26) as the Opening Night selection.

The relationship flowered after Richard Peña's debut as director of programming, and this was a felicitous marriage , and there was a special fluency of Peña and Almodóvar together on stage, since the former was a fluent Spanish speaker as well as a fluent host and interviewer. The next opener was 1999's All About My Mother , on to Bad Education (NYFF42) and Volver (NYFF44) were selected as Centerpieces, and Live Flesh (NYFF35), Talk to Her (NYFF40), Broken Embraces (NYFF47), and Parallel Mothers (NYFF59) were Closing Night selections. Additional NYFF selections include The Flower of My Secret (NYFF33), The Skin I Live In (NYFF49), Julieta (NYFF54), Pain and Glory (NYFF57), The Human Voice (NYFF58), and Strange Way of Life (NYFF61).

The Room Next Door, 110 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2024, showing also at many international festivals including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 70%.

[Chris Knipp]

DANIEL CRAIG AS "WILLIAM LEE" IN QUEER

LUCA GUADAGNINO: QUEER (2024)
NYFF Spotlight Gala Screening

A dramatization of William S. Burroughs' autobiograpical 1953 novel (published in 1985)

1950. William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American expat in Mexico City in his 30s escaping US drug charges and drinking heavily, spends his days alone at local bars save for a few other members of the American expat homosexual or "queer" community. (It is important to note that at this time the word "queer" did not at all have the air of emblematic pride it has acquired lately.) Lee's encounter with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a newly arrived ex-serviceman who was with the Counter-intelligence Corps in Germany, leads to an infatuation and hope for intimacy. Lee (william Burroughs' alter ego), whose followup to Junky this is, is off heroin now, with resultingly raw emotions and newly aroused sexual desires.

In his introduction to Queer in 1985 when it was first published Burroughs wrote, "In my first novel, Junky, the protagonist 'Lee' comes across as integrated and self contained, sure of himself and where he is going. In Queer he is disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose." The novel wasn't published till over thirty years after he wrote it because at the time Burroughs found it uninteresting, and the experience it evokes too painful, besides which the overt homosexuality of it would have made it scandalous, even illegal, at the time of writing.

Recently Guadagnino has been on a roll with one zinger after another, but Queer is a misstep. This film is a polished but somehow curiously clueless effort by him, Craig, and his costars. How much do they understand about the writer William Burroughs alone because of whom the source book is of any interest? They make the action involving, even engaging, though (save for an entertaining appearance by Lesley Manville) the latter parts are weaker then the early ones. I'm not sure it was meant to be taken this way by Burroughs, and I'm still not sure after watching the film why Guadagnino chose to make it. It would seem to me that rather than the warmth of personality that Daniel Craig, cast spectacularly against type, brings to it, what would have made a film of Queer come to life would have been a recreation of the raucous, raunchy world of late Forties Mexico City, which might have been impossible to do, but anyway is a possibility that vanishes here because of the choice to shoot everything in the studios of Cineciittà.

The city must have had some of the same qualities, wide open, drug-friendly, extralegal, that drew Burroughs later on to Tangiers. It is obvious in the film that the backgrounds are not real, just painted props. As for the warmth of Daniel Craig, it goes so strongly against everything one has ever known of William Burroughs, how can it be suitable?

There is understandably much praise for Daniel Craig's performance. He makes the otherwise rather thin scenes watchable (Starkey too brings warmth - again too much, becuse the whole point is that he is a cold fish, a cock teaser). But if fidelity to the novel source is any concern , it's worth an immediate shout-out first off to Cronenberg's over 30-year-old but still very watchable Naked Lunch, a witty and creditable effort to film the unfilmable and what is by far Burroughs' masterpiece, by comparison with which Queer is a drab apprenticeship piece, a warmup worth our attention chiefly because of what Burroughs became later with the publication, through the crucial help of Allen Ginsberg and others, of his radical masterpiece, Naked Lunch.

If he were seeking an adaptation true to the text, Guadagnino might seem to be breaking a butterfly (or a drab moth) upon a wheel. It's worth remembering that in Cronenberg's bold 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch William Lee is played by the blandly neutral Peter Weller, and that might be closer to the character and the fleedgling Burroughs himself than the overwhelming Craig. But that would not work, because this story is about William Lee, whereas in Naked Lunch he is just a reflector. See Owen Gleiberman's excellent and favorable Variety review, which makes clear that Guadagnino makes this film better and deeper than the book, as well he might, while also showing more of both strength and vulnerability in Burroughs than he ever revealed in Queer or in his wryly emphatic later public persona as what Gleiberman calls a "punk icon in the ’80s." See also Fionnuala Halligan's wry and knowing review in Screen Daily,, which concludes that Guadagnino's Queer "has all the provocation but none of the haunting power that [Cronenberg's] Naked Lunch still holds, almost 35 years later." Her math is more generous than mine, but otherwise we're in agreement.

Halligan suggests that shooting the film not in Mexico but in the closed studios of Cinecittà achieves an interesting and resonant effect but also an artificiality that will help contribute to its feeling alienating to today's LGBUQ+ audience. Despite the importance of its author, one of the key figures and a kind of elder doyen of the Beat era, Queer is a peripheral work, its choice by Guadagnino a somewhat odd one. (Mind you, in Queer Burroughs already has his "routines" and all his ideas about hypnotism, mind control, especially telepathy - hence the yage; but within the framework of a relatively conventional novel.)

The novel is unfinished. It is not, like this film, in two distinct parts. In the novel Lee persuades Allerton to accompany him on a trip south in search of yage, also known as ayajuasca, the psychedelic plant, and agree to periodic sex. But that is not a psychedelic writing episode, as the film shifts in cinematic style. Most of all, there is no special coming together in the novel, because there can't be, because in the frustrating real life experience Burroughs was trying to expiate there wasn't one.

Currently there is a free online PDF text of Burroughs' Queer here. Recommended particularly for Burroughs' 1985 introduction, describing Mexico City, explaining why he was there, and declaring that his fatal shooting of his wife was what turned him into a writer. If Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes had woven more external factual details about Burroughs into the film as Cronenberg does into his film Naked Lunch, that would have added color and interest.

Queer, 151 mins,, debuted Sept. 3, 2024 at Venice, showing also at Toronto, Mill Valley, and the NYFF. The film will be released Oct. 6, 2024 (NYC). General AMC release Nov. 27.Metacritic rating: 7̶5̶%̶. Now 74% (10/9/24).

[Chris Knipp]

SELTON MELLO, FERNANDA TORRES, GUILHERME SILVEIRA IN I'M STILL HERE

WALTER SALLES: I'M STILL HERE

Dramatic recreation of the destruction of a family by a dictatorship

There have been many dictatorships and juntas in Latin America - Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Haiti, Cuba, the list goes on - but the one depicted in Walter Salles' film he knew personally, in Brazil. He does not recount the political details for us or give us any dates - except dates in the life of the Paiva family. He knew them in Rio in the early seventies when he was a teenager and has reported often visiting the "beautiful house" where they lived, near the beach, where we see the family cavorting. They are happy as only Brazilians on the beach in Rio can be.

But this is not about Walter. It's first about Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), next about his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres; as an old woman, Fernanda Montenegro, star of Salles' early masterpiece, the 1998 Central Station), and then about his five children, four girls and one boy, Marcello (Guilherme Silveira as a boy, Antonio Saboia as an adult disabled in an accident who was to become an important writer). The girls, one of whom goes off to study in post-Beatles England, draw more of the attention at first, but Marcelo was to write Feliz Ano Velho (Happy Old Year), a book about himself and his family that made him famous, and later Ainda estou aqui (I'm Still Here), the book that gave its name to this film.

The first half hour is the celebration of a happy Brazilian family. The father seems mostly there. There are frolics on the beach, much togetherness, ice cream, many plans, lots of smiling photos taken. Then when the family is at home, the men come. They are seedy, bearded, grim, armed. They take husband and father Rubens, the big soft jovial man, away. He goes and dresses in coat and tie for the surprise journey. He is to give a "deposition." He says goodbye to Eunice. Is there any sadder moment than a pater familias being taken away from his lively family by the minions of a dictatorship?

It's the last Eunice or the children ever see of Rubens, the last of the happy family. Salles wonderfully (if you can call such a thing wonderful) captures the way happiness can be turned off for a family. Eunice is taken away too, with the eldest daughter, to one of the dictatorship's hells, probably military barracks, where she is kept for several weeks, held alone in a dark cell, and repeatedly questioned. Her husband, who we learn later was formerly a congressman but has for years not been involved in politics, they accuse of being a communist - he was not; but his very real activism against the regime, though hinted at later, we learn nothing about. We see Eunice's ordeal. We also see when she is returned home from it, a memorable sequence.

It's night, and she lets herself in quietly, looks in on her daughters, without waking them. Salles captures so vividly the intensity of this moment. One also feels the divided mood, when the older sisters know and the younger kids are shielded from knowing that anything wrong is afoot. Which it is, of course, very wrong. It may feel Salles is taking too much time. Rubens Paiva never comes back: why mark time in forever? But it makes good sense because this is as precise a film as it is a warm and heartbreaking one. There is a process of attrition, as the family is long guarded by a revolving corps guards first inside, then outside, the house.

The psychological blows are accompanied by physical ones. The dictatorship doesn't make plans for the Paiva family's upkeep and - guess what? Following the male-centric rules of the time, Eunice has no access to the family bank account without Rubens' signature, and there is no money. She has to give up land for cash and, against the outcries of the younger children who understand nothing, she sells the house and they move to be near the grandparents in São Paolo because there is no money. When the house is emptied it is even more impressive. We see three big high ceilinged rooms enfilade downstairs, then a whole upstairs.

In fact we realize the film skips over things, because the story of Eunice is elided somewhat: we learn only that she goes back to university, studies law, and becomes a champion of indigenous people against the Amazon forest land grabs for years to come. We jump to 1996. Then there is a final jump, to 2014, when the family is together, with 94-year-old Fernanda Montenegro riveting as a silent, wheelchair-bound Eunice with advanced Alzheimer's after a life of accomplishment without her stolen husband. Among one of her perverse satisfactions has been finally persuading the state to give her a death certificate for her husband.

It was six years into Brazil's 22-year military dictatorship, in 1971, when government critic and former congressman Rubens Paiva was taken away and "disappeared" from his loving family. This is the story of his family's exerience of this deprivation and attempt to see to the bottom of it. Jessica Kiang points out that filmmaker Salles has a personal stake, adapted from the son Marcelo Rubens Paiva's memoir. Salles knew the family as far back as the Sixties and spent much time at the "lovely house" near the beach that appears, in person, in the opening sequence of this film.

This is a shattering experience, depicted most memorably by Walter Salles. As Eunice Fernanda Torres gives a valiant and tireless performance. But where the film excels is in its creation of a world, its mise-en-scène, and the fineness of the ensemble acting and Salles' direction. A magnificent film, which requires much digesting.

I'm still Here, 136 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, showing also at Toronto, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Hawaii International (Oahu), London BFI, Zurich, Mill Valley, La Roche, AFI, and other US and international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 80%.