By RODRIGO DE ABREU PINTO*
Commentary on the film directed by Walter Salles.
The In Between premiered in Brazilian cinemas after a successful trajectory at international festivals, with emphasis on the award for best screenplay at the Venice Festival.
Based on the book of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the film tells the story of the author's family from the kidnapping of his father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, tortured and murdered by the civil-military dictatorship in 1971.
After her husband's disappearance, Eunice Paiva took over the reins of the house and the family, from then on formed by her and the couple's 5 children. The In Between It is the story of overcoming the character played by Fernanda Torres, whose empathy brought more than half a million spectators to Brazilian cinemas in the opening week.
The film is divided into 2 moments – before and after the death of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) – each immersed in its own aesthetic.
The first moment takes place in the family home, located in the Leblon neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. A house on the beachfront, with its doors always open, where friends and colleagues of all ages come in to eat, chat, and listen to music. Sunlight floods the house and characterizes the film's photography, while music (Caetano, Gal, Tom Zé, Tim Maia), children's screams, and the waves of the sea accompany the lively dialogues between the characters.
As his father's kidnapping approaches, Walter Salles is skillful in inserting elements that clash with the carpe diem immanent and raise a sense of impending tragedy. The nostalgia inspired by the Super8 images recorded by her daughter Vera (Valentina Herszage) suggests that the present is about to become a distant memory, but it is Eunice's eyes and ears that capture what is to come: trucks with soldiers driving down the street, helicopters crossing the sky and her daughter's delay in returning home.
When family and friends gather for a photo on the beach to say goodbye to Vera, we are certain that the photograph represents more than that: the farewell to an era.
Rubens is kidnapped by the military and the effects are represented in the sudden transformation of the Paiva house. The children, oblivious to what is happening, continue to come and go, go up and down the stairs… until they realize the spontaneity petrified into fatality: no longer their friends, but the police officers who follow and monitor the family's routine. The film's aesthetic is redefined by the closed windows and dark photography, the stammering dialogues and the muted soundtrack, which contrast in every way with the house that existed until then.
It is noteworthy that the house's point of view is adopted to illustrate the transformations imposed by force by the military, especially because it features a director who stood out for his affiliation with the genre of road movie. It is the impulse to drift that characterizes the characters of Foreign Land (1995) and Central do Brasil (1998), Walter Salles' first feature films, for example.
This time, instead of drifting alongside the intellectuals and activists who were trying to free Rubens, the film stays with Eunice. And even in the portrayal of this character, the focus is less on her wanderings in search of information about her husband, and more on the challenges of managing the house and children after her husband's disappearance.
Em The In Between, the political experience is a means of dramatizing the intimate experience of the family, and not the other way around. It is not at stake whether Rubens Paiva was innocent; whether the methods of armed struggle were justified; whether the communist danger was a quixotic fantasy, as discussed in Marcelo Rubens Paiva's book. It is not even at stake the protagonist's political choices, since her attributes emphasized by the film are dedicated to preserving the family – and the best example of this is that, although the final part presents Eunice's political action in defense of indigenous peoples and the preservation of the memory of the military dictatorship, the focus of the film always falls on her abilities focused on the family, such as the memory of where the photographs were taken and the money she lends to her daughter Bia (Olivia Torres), now an adult.
Without identifying with defined political projects, the protagonist is driven by a sense of responsibility based on the private sphere of feeling (maternal love, in this case). The In Between does not condemn a worldview (left or right), but the “evil”, the “cruel”, the “inhumane”, as embodied especially in the methods of torture (practiced by the right), but also in the kidnappings of ambassadors (practiced by the left) that the film repeatedly presents, including the insistence of friend Baby Bocaiúva (Dan Stulbach) to Eunice that Rubens had never had any participation in political struggle. The result of this is a depoliticized humanism in which the Paiva Family is presented as a “moral reserve” amidst the sea of iniquity in the country.
Se The In Between remains irresistible, it is because Walter Salles is skillful enough to prevent the valorization of intimacy from becoming cheesy or emotional. At the same time that Eunice represses her tears and the content of her speeches to protect her children, the film manages a continuous anticlimax that obstructs the sentimental and cathartic excesses typical of melodrama. And in the end, we admire Eunice for her integrity, courage and intelligence in defending her family, and not for complacency or paternalism in the face of her situation (as happens with the protagonist of another recent success in Brazilian cinema, The Invisible Life (2019) by Karim Aïnouz).
There is also politics in portraying a housewife in this way, of course. In fact, it is precisely the rigor in portraying universal feelings and themes (struggle for survival, father absence, new beginnings) that has led to the film's success on the international circuit. Without minimizing the importance of this after years of censorship, dismantling of culture and attacks on Brazilian cinema institutions, it is worth asking whether the efficiency of the discourse does not occur at the risk of flattening the horizon of social understanding of the country.
*Rodrigo de Abreu Pinto he is a lawyer and a philosophy teacher in elementary school.
Reference
I'm still here
Brazil, 2024, 135 minutes.
Directed by: Walter Salles.
Screenplay: Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega.
Cinematography: Adrian Teijido.
Editing: Affonso Gonçalves.
Art Direction: Carlos Conti
Music: Warren Ellis
Cast: Fernanda Torres; Fernanda Montenegro; Selton Mello; Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Guilherme Silveira and Cora Ramalho, Olivia Torres, Antonio Saboia, Marjorie Estiano, Maria Manoella and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha.
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