By LUCIO VERCOZA*
The ability of Walter Salles' cinema to penetrate the fragile threads of public debate in Brazil – or of published opinion
The film I'm still here circulates. It keeps circulating. And its circulation is not like that of a bakery fan: which turns and turns and remains in the same place – blowing little wind. The beginning of the circulation of the film occurred, above all, on the skin and hair of people who left their homes to go to the movies.
The second circulation circuit, which is an offshoot of the first, is in the capacity of Walter Salles' cinema to penetrate the rickety threads of public debate in Brazil – or of published opinion. Therefore, in this second sphere of circulation, it did not take long for reviewers to feed the Blogs, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and pages of the mainstream media – with both laudatory and relentless analyses.
Among the harshest criticisms, I would like to highlight the text by Raul Arthuso, recently published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul. The text is relevant because it shifts the discussion to the field of aesthetics. However, in his eagerness to support the thesis that Walter Salles' film would be a step backwards in the context of contemporary national cinema, the author twists the argument, downplaying the political weight of The In Between.
In a quick analysis, it is possible to highlight passages in which Raul Arthuso overdoes it – making the film analyzed seem different: “his emphasis is on intimate narrative, memory, personal relationships to the detriment of history and social reality, even if this is present as a diffuse backdrop.” “[…] political reality is just a detail in the plot.” “[…] he is unable to build a fictional world that has something to do with our reality.” “[…] he produces emotional effects, without attacking or tensioning local issues.”
This entire line of argument leads to the construction of a film portrait that would be politically minuscule and almost irrelevant: “that has little to say about our reality”; however, it is the opposite: through the aesthetics of intimate detail, Walter Salles managed to tie a knot that connects the past to the present – making the viewer feel the past as something that concerns what is in front of us. And this trait, of being able to revive memory through art, has enormous political power.
Both critics who would like the film to be something close to a pamphlet (like the excessively programmatic analyses of Jones Manoel, or Chavoso from USP), and those who demand an avant-garde aesthetic, disregard the fact that the strong political impact of the film derives from an approach that touches on big politics through the key of subtlety of detail and micro-history.
The work forms a kind of artistic knot – without adopting a language explicitly inherited from the Cinema Novo of the 1960s, nor from the recent avant-garde movements of the mangrove swamps or the backlands of the Northeast –; a knot that does not write a treatise on the economic policy of the governments of the military dictatorship, nor on the union struggle (as programmatic critics claimed).
However, it is an even more subtle knot, as it connects the past to the present in front of the eyes and ears of the general public: giving a symbolic slap in the face and mask of Bolsonarism. And it does this without explicitly saying what it does. And it does this by constructing an aesthetic that very well harmonizes form with content – without belonging to the vanguards of form, and without giving in to the narrow patrol of those who demanded a pamphlet film.
Perhaps the film's greatest success lies precisely in this: in capturing a way of belonging to a time through the 3x4 of a family. And it does so without the intention of launching a treatise. And it does so by demonstrating that a language that is apparently simple (in terms of innovation) can be subtle and profound. The audience, through different paths, understood what was on the screen and felt, for a few minutes, the feeling of the world. And the feeling of the world is ambiguous: full of tears, fury, hope, applause and memory.
*Lucio Vercoza é professor of sociology at the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL).
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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