By FERNÃO PESSOA RAMOS*

The film promoted the country's reunion with a literally unburied past, which insists on “being here”

1.

I'm still here is the Brazilian film of the moment and certainly has credit for it. It promoted the country's reunion with a literally unburied past, which insists on “being here”. With the wave, right-wing social media seems to have become paralyzed, hypnotized, without the usual agility to fake news.

The conjunction that united the cultural recognition of the Empire – in its greatest consecration ceremony (the Oscar) – simultaneously with a drama that resumes the denunciation of the dungeons of the dictatorship, is at the origin of the short-circuit. Strangeness that is felt on the other side of the ideological spectrum in the unceremonious dazzlement with Hollywood, although here surrounded by the qualities of the work itself and in the vibration of the choked cry to which it gave vent.

A cry of affirmation from a memory that was sought to be smothered, for which not even the balm of mourning and the wake of the torn body were granted. Eunice Paiva is a bit like our Antigone (daughter of Oedipus, to whom the tyrant Creon, in the homonymous tragedy by Sophocles, forbade her from watching over and burying her brother's body, leaving it exposed to vultures and dogs). Eunice was also denied the burial of her husband's body, which was exhumed more than once and then thrown, without burial, into a river or ocean.

For the Greeks, and perhaps for us too, this was the ultimate penalty in a universe that escapes a shared ethic, within which the otherness of me, the other, cannot be subjected, even if it is an enemy. In the dystonia of this gap comes the horror (and tragedy) of the human, with the approval and exasperation of the Apollonian and Dionysian gods. With Rubens Paiva, in addition to the torture and death of the one who is “no longer here” to plead, there is also the denial of the experience of loss, and its active transformation into mourning, by the one who could neither watch over nor bury the body of the loved one.

In our case, in the memoirist account of Eunice and Rubens’ son, Marcelo Paiva, she decides to “bury” Rubens, despite the state, the law, and written and unwritten ordinances. She does this beyond the values ​​of a consensual community otherness that is not capable of establishing a legal order regarding responsibilities. Although based on the assumption of the legal order, her fight for the issuance of the death certificate is exhausted in the fissure that the tragedy constitutes, based on the space of power and will.

The same tension between Antigone's action in the irreconcilable mode of tragedy and the shared responsibility of others founds the community through the open wound that does not heal. It is constituted without bottom, in an abyss and repeatedly, in the figuration of the body that endures, unburied, beyond presence, devoured by dogs and birds. There is an experience necessary for the wake that is a scar that translates the sensory perception of the dead body in the proximity of touch. Jacques Derrida in Glass/1974 – arguing about the closure that negation brings in Hegelian dialectics (Antigone originally appears as the theme of the “repeal”/overcoming the law/moral duty in “Phenomenology of Spirit”/1807) – and also, to another extent, Jean-Luc Nancy in The Community Discovered/1986 (“The Inoperable Community”), contain delicate reflections, within the universe of thought of both, on the political dimension that Antigone’s irreconcilable singularity represents.

She is a figure of the “spacing” that grounds individuality in the inherent exposure of our singularity, an irreducible “remainder” that affirms difference, a tragic figure that opens the gap and resists sublimation. The dimension of the inoperative absolute that mourning neither concludes nor closes is a radical expression of that which, as incompleteness, is beyond reason and the institutional order constituted as universal ethics. Hence the community dimension as a properly political interruption of that which does not operate, beyond the contradiction between divine/familial law on the one hand (Antigone’s power) and the state on the other.

2.

The “stubborn”, stubborn and obstinate silence of Eunice Paiva – well translated by the stern-faced, bordering on “annoyed” interpretation by Fernanda Torres – reflects this “Antigone” side of a character/historical figure who has the stamina to support an ethics of self-responsibility, which goes beyond catharsis and escapes institutional consensus. And this goes beyond guilt and the demand for compassion, in a culture that values ​​expression through tears and the forced solidarity that it implies.

In a country of crybabies, Eunice is the one who doesn't cry, as is made clear, not so much in Walter Salles' film, but in the book's account. The In Between/2015, by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. The exception (the convulsive crying occurs hidden behind the door), which confirms the rule, is exposed to us by Marcelo when he narrates his return home on the day the Brazilian state delivers Rubens Paiva's death certificate to Eunice.

The book reveals a lot about Walter Salles' film, through its distances and proximities. The good script, awarded in Venice (although not remembered in the North American awards), is perfect for the fictional reconstruction of the historical fact through what we call docudrama.

Docudramas are fictional reconstructions (in the form of cinematic classicism), with a dramatic composition arranged by an audiovisual “mega-narrator” who takes the viewer by the hand, showing the dialogues in space. In this way, he arranges, or twists, the event in a way dear to fiction, with more marked or nuanced characters, condensed parallel actions, strung together twists, cathartic recognitions, etc.

The historical fact is certainly there, but the fictional/dramatic narrative should not, and cannot, be analyzed in the same way as a sociological thesis. It is also not a documentary, which has a different voice structure and whose enunciative form should not be confused with the quality of propositional assertions measured by greater or lesser transparency of objectivity (although the particularities of this point with the docudrama are certainly different).

Triumph of the Will/1935 by Leni Riefenstahl, for example, is a documentary. It is a lying, Nazi, dangerous, ethically reprehensible documentary, but it is still a documentary film. The conceptual confusions here proliferate (I wrote about the subject in But after all… what exactly is a documentary??/2008).

No case of The In Between, book and film focus on the same event, using Marcelo Paiva's personal experience as the original source. However, they have different tones and emphases when dealing with the context of the Brazilian dictatorship, the torture, murder and concealment of Rubens Paiva's body. They were also made at different times.

The publication is from 2015 and has a lighter, less dichotomous tone, before the emergence of Bolsonarism and the new terrifying discourse of the extreme right. The film was made in 2023 and released in 2024, bringing in the flesh (in the flesh of Fernanda Torres' face, for example) not only the mark of the leaden years of the dictatorship, but also the concrete ghost (the specter) of its return, now as a historical farce. It feels the need to highlight, because the contrast is part of the whirlwind in which it returns. In the manner of an affirmation, it needs to avenge the opposite meaning of the denialist discourse, increasingly widespread and with a breath that surprises those who thought it was outdated.

In the book, the despair in the personal accident that struck the young Marcelo Paiva – who is not in the foreground in The In Between, as we envision it in happy old year – , we can feel an overlapping responsibility for the tragic action (the father's death), which does not therefore affect the direction of the mise-en-scène, or in the script. One feels in Marcelo Paiva's memorialist account the need for a libertarian release of this responsibility, spreading throughout the narrative through constant irony.

It arises in opposition to the Christian guilt of submission to confession. It declares justice by exposing that which insists on “still being here,” unburied. The affirmation of power is a form of resistance in the inevitable being-with of sociability. Neither divine justice nor legal institutionality can replace the singular autonomy of the spacing of individuality – the limit of a radical vision of others in their irreducible difference, whether through the politics of friendship in reciprocity or in the tension of an impossible hospitality.

It is significant that the epigraph of the The In Between by Marcelo Paiva is a verse by David Bowie, taken from the song S"Planet Earth is blue, and there's/ nothing I can do”. Other times, another era, although still close, in which the blue of the planet and post-dictatorship life still flourished in the libertarian spirit of a generation that Marcelo, born in 1959, was part of. The São Paulo (and his student life at Unicamp) that he describes in the book, permeated at a certain point by Rose Bobons, Madames Satãs, Napalms, and Carbonos 14, certainly belongs to the culture that he lived in his youth and that left the scene without leaving many traces, unlike the universality that assumed the murder of his father, thickening into the great story.

In the 2015 publication, the memory of the particular, of the ordinary everyday that runs through individual experience, is founded on a mode of sharing that the film does not capture. The reason may be that, especially in the first half of the audiovisual work, we breathe another memory that is intertwined with and inflects Marcelo's original material. It superimposes, in the view of the sands of solar Leblon, the experience shared by director Walter Salles.

In several interviews, Walter Salles mentions this sharing in the Paiva household, through his friendship with Marcelo's older sister, Veroca – in London and close to the tropicalists in exile when their father was arrested and murdered in January 1971. There is a “something”, a taste, in the flavor of the super 8/kodachrome coloring of some period shots, which brings us yet another “Casa da Gávea” (as it appears indirectly in the feature films In the Intense Now/2017 and more explicitly in Santiago/2007, audiovisual documentaries, memorialists, in the first person, by João Salles, Walter's brother, about the Moreira Salles family and their residence in Gávea) than the “Casa do Leblon” itself. The latter, unlike the first, constitutes a space for a quick and transitory experience of the Paiva family.

Marcelo Rubens Paiva is one of the great memoirists of Brazilian literature at the end of the century, author of works that can be read in one breath. In The In Between, the segment of the family's life in Leblon occupies a relatively short space, certainly smaller than that of the audiovisual narrative, which concentrates its most visually intense moments on it. In Walter Salles' work, life in the sunny Leblon surrounds, and then haunts, the Paiva family. With the tragic death of the father, the family loses the space of happiness to plunge into the sad and gray São Paulo, where they are destined to survive within the same leaden tone that covers the country.

The contrast in this dichotomy does not have the same measure in the memoirist account. It corresponds to the adaptation of the script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega. In the audiovisual narrative, it finds an expression that is also the adolescent memory of the director Walter Salles himself, overlapping and shaping the account in the book. It is in this sense that the house in Gávea and the house in Leblon, to use the metaphor, at some point touch each other in the first half of the film, but in favor of the former. This opens up space for the leap, in an individuation of internal resonance, through the link it establishes with the totality that gravitates in the history of the dictatorship and its repressive apparatus.

3.

In the docudrama The In Between (I believe the term is more pertinent than “historical fiction”) the characters are developed to give density to the plot, acquiring a differentiated thickness. This is where the composite art of cinema lies, as it is “impure” art (in the sense that critic André Bazin gave to this term), a simultaneous congregation of aesthetic expressions that are not “media” properly speaking, nor structurally intermedial.

Cinema is an expression composed of a strong dramatic, dialogical dimension, with parallels in the performing arts, but which is a photograph of time (in the composition of the light that passes); and also music; script (the writing); editing, as a sequence in the articulation of shots (responsible for the rhythm that makes duration, a central concept in film analysis); noise mixing, or film sound (a gigantic aspect of cinematographic aesthetics, generally relegated); scenographic creation (magnificent in the case of The In Between) and, more importantly, mise-en-scène, or the space of the staging in the shot, generally centered around the figure of the director.

It is in this space that the main half of film art occurs (we already have more than two), which is the acting of the actors, the interpretation, in the expression of the human body, through speech, tones of voice, facial expressions, gestures, movement in space (entry and exit of the field), etc. Stanley Cavell (a North-American philosopher who thought deeply about cinema in its form as a kind of skeptical projection of the world), writes that one of the particularities of the camera-mechanism, determining the scene, “is to give priority to the actor over the character” (Walter Benjamin agrees with him).

The cinematographic form, especially in its more classical variants (but also, certainly, in avant-garde works), usually brings the expression of the actors as a central element of aesthetics. Eduardo Coutinho understood this dimension well and, in a documentary film (it is certainly a documentary and not a fictional narrative), entitled Scene Game, in which actress Fernanda Torres gives a brilliant performance, incisively deconstructs central dimensions of actors' interpretation in cinematographic works.

The In Between brings Fernanda Torres composing a performance with strong and marked tones that reveal the actress's effort, beyond her type. The critic of the French newspaper Le Monde, when analyzing this effort, went so far as to call it “monochord”. We can certainly disagree, but I believe that it points, while missing the target as a whole, to real content. Fernanda Torres develops a performance that demands a marked construction, in a theatrical mode that is not particularly hers (see the “skits” television shows that stick to your figure so easily) and in which you may not feel so comfortable.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the crystallized personality of Eunice Paiva, with whom she works, is socially known and, in the particularity of the family, she was close to the director in adolescence and was present in the takes/mise-en-scène of the film with some of its members.

If Marcelo Paiva's memorialistic construction gives rise to the character constructed in the filmic-narrative structure of the docudrama, Eunice Paiva, in the imaginary dimension of her personality, is present in Fernanda's performance. The actress had to find a point to carry the historical figure who, in the interpretation she constructs, has a strong weight, literally making her arch to breathe.

The weight of a bent Antigone that Fernanda Torres carries, including on the red carpets that surrounded her public appearances (blending the character with the individuality of her person). She is also bent over, dressed in black in mourning, without the right to the wider smile that Eunice Paiva, herself, gave herself in the photo of Headline, as the film and book report. It is a type that does not fit well with the actress's public personality that we are used to and that makes her fluctuate.

One gets the impression, but this is certainly the subjective impression of the critic, that the staging is more about the figures of the tragedy seen through the prism of the Gávea house, which is expressed in the strong rein of the mise-en-scène that Walter Salles' direction of the actors imposes (despite the image "nonchalant” and affable manner that the director displays publicly).

And this figure is the figure of Eunice/Antigone, carrying the prohibition of mourning and of watching over the torn body of her murdered husband. And yet, this is not the Eunice that is seen in the book by her son Marcelo Paiva, between the short interregnum of life in sunny Leblon and then in what the film imagines to be leaden São Paulo. The Eunice Paiva who insists on smiling expands in her son's testimony beyond the episode of the photo of Headline, in a way that we do not see in audiovisual narrative.

The interpretation that Fernanda Torres carries has the weight of a vision that is half cathartic, half pious, which conflicts with the proud and self-confident woman, who is self-sufficient beyond her family duties (a constant complaint to mother Eunice by the memoirist Marcelo, with a touch of irony and admiration).

In the film, Eunice Paiva seems to live to promote compassion in a style dear to Walter Salles, who likes to explore the limits of emotion through the catharsis of pity, especially in his works with national settings, as we find in Dora/Fernanda Montenegro de Central do Brasil or in the same Fernandinha of the character Maria that she plays in The first day. And yet, Eunice in Marcelo Paiva's book carries life as a learning experience of singularity and autonomy in skeptical harmony, which does not want to be carried away by the abyss of crying in the tragic crater/Antigone, nor climb the path of exaltation that breathes self-pity.

Em The In Between, Marcelo Paiva reproduces in its entirety a chronicle of Antônio Callado, published in 1995, which, for him, sums up his mother's personality well: thin and sunburned, Eunice, on a weekend in 1971, shortly after leaving prison, swam 100 meters out to sea to the boat where Antônio Callado was to greet him from the sea. The columnist delicately describes her figure arriving at the boat through the water, and then ends the column: "Eunice's face remained wet and salty for a long time, just like that morning in Búzios.

The water was no longer from the sea.” And Marcelo Paiva continues with the quote from the chronicle: “My mother and I read the column (by Antônio Callado, in Sheet, where the text was published) together, during lunch at her house. I think she was flattered. Do you remember that day in Búzios? – Of course. It was days after I was released, in 1971, I was very thin, tanned, in a bikini, beautiful… – she said, and went smiling to the kitchen. What matters was that she was thin, very thin, tanned and beautiful. And that prison did not break her inside”. (Pgs 29/30, Electronic Edition/Objetiva, RJ).

This is a difficult scene to fit into the film, especially since it is outside the pre-prison Leblon quadrangle. It shows resilience as self-confidence centered on self-affirmation in a Eunice who runs away from the character that Fernanda Torres struggles to portray. Her performance adds a step to this clash with a flat character.

The interpretation, at times, frees itself and takes flight, bringing the power of the great actress as she closes herself “inside”, in the intensity of the expression she has constructed. It is when she manages to let go of the yoke that folds her and expand the rope of tension more naturally – soon pulled down in the serious form of the serious frown. She is closed in on herself, affirming the intensity of brilliant moments, but without bringing the palette of colors with distension to nuance.

In any case, it can be said that it is an interpretation (and a clear direction of this by mise-en-scène) that shows the character in her most exhausted dimension of Antigone. In the universe of Walter Salles (who undoubtedly has a filmography of density and authorial weight) this exploration oscillates and falls into the easier demand for compassion, a recurring affection in the line of action.

To sum up the argument, Fernanda Torres constructs a Eunice Paiva who demands a restricted staging in the most closed type of expression, even when the smile emerges, which, like a leap, remains suspended in the air without the naturalness of hesitation, before returning frozen to its proper place in the frown. Without space to take flight, Fernanda Torres' construction of the character, in the aforementioned effort, has its wings clipped – for better or for worse. In the latter, the aforementioned monotonous dimension fits, implying the dimension without nuances.

The actress escapes the trap by the intensity with which she breathes more easily when she is not focused. The facial expression of what would be Eunice's determined self-restraint appears, with precise and economical gestures accompanying her body as a whole.

This is the dilemma, an Antigone who is not “broken inside” – a dilemma not only for the character and the actress, but also for the historical figure of the mother and widow. The intellectual and fighter Eunice Paiva, whom her son Marcelo Paiva describes in the portrait of her personality, now refers to the more universal dimension that binds the whole itself. In this sense, The In Between is situated at a confluence to which the mise-en-scène of the memory of Walter Salles the director must still be added.

More subtly detectable, it is expressed in the experience of ordinary everyday life in which the roots of individuality fade away as subjectivity in the layer of the event that the film portrays.

*Fernao Pessoa Ramos and pfull professor at the Institute of Arts/Unicamp, co-author of New history of Brazilian cinema (Sesc Editions).

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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