I’m Still Here

Director: Walter Salles

Distributed by: Sony Pictures International

Released: November 2024

Country: Brazil

Not much comes to mind when I think of Brazil, that large Portuguese-speaking South American country. Maybe Pele, maybe the Rain Forests, maybe the largest of the mixed nuts. Certainly not the 1959 BFF Winner BlackOrpheus, set during the Rio annual Carnival. I’m not proud of the fact I knew nothing of the political dynamic or history, since Rio is always seen as a sort of party-town, like Cancun or Vegas or Athens, Ohio. But it seems things were quite unparty-like from 1964 to 1985, when the dictatorship government of the Federative Republic of Brazil was doing the kind of things dictatorships do—including disappearing any person who was a serious threat.

I’m Still Here puts us in late 1970, as we visit with the well-off Paiva family in Rio. The Paivas are a pretty normal, fun-loving family, with Rubens and his wife Eunice raising five kids, ages from about 7 to 18. The movie allows us about 30 minutes of relaxing and enjoying the Paivas as they do stuff we Americans

Ice cream with the family

do with our families—go to the beach, get an sundae at an ice cream shop, listen to current music, and tease each other. But right from the start the oldest kid gets mildly harassed by police on her way home with friends and we see a few stories on the TV of officials being kidnapped by the government. The paradise of family life will not last long.

One day, a few rough-looking goons show up to the house saying Rubens is needed for questioning. It seems Rubens, a former Brazilian Congressmen, had been surreptitiously assisting those opposed to the government and had been under watch for some time. Once Rubens gets into the car escorted by the goons, we’ll never see him again.

But Rubens isn’t the main character of I’m Still Here,

Similar goons taking on Jim Rockford

it’s Eunice, the titular I’m in I’m Still Here. Once Rubens is whisked away for some interviews at an undisclosed location, his wife must keep the family going while not knowing what has happened to her husband. To make matters worse, the government believes that whatever anti-government subversive shenanigans the husband was involved in, so may the wife have been. It’s clear the salad days of life in a spacious house on the beautiful coast of Guanabara Bay have come to an end. The movie is about the strength and determination of Eunice in wake of this life transition.

I’m Still Here is based on the 2015 memoir of the young son of the Paivas, Marcello, who has his own heroic story as a successful writer. But that’s for another movie.

Ain't so bad!

The Title:  Ainda Estou Aqui. I remember Rocky saying something like this to Mr. T after getting the crap knocked out of him. Now THAT was a movie.

Culture:  When we see Rio at the beginning in the movie, it seems like the spring-breakish beach spot of movies like Blame It on Rio when Michael Caine has a sexual thing with his friend’s daughter. But like that movie, a “comedy” poking fun at a man past middle age making it with a sixteen-year-old, I’m Still Here has a darkness just below the surface. At first, a police blockade the older kids have to endure looks pretty similar to a DUI Checkpoint, until we see how the police treat the youths just out trying to have a fun time.

The Court of the Crimson King, 1969

The opening act emphasizes the fun the family has together by using music they enjoy together, including the younger daughters singing along to the 1969 controversial French song “Je T’aime … moi non plus” with the parents looking on, grateful the girls don’t know French. Music also is a form of subversion; we see one of the goons staying at the house looking with slight disgust at the collection, including the cover of King Crimson’s Court of the Crimson King.

Agenda danger: There are definite good guys and bad guys in this film but the fact is, the government was a ruthless military dictatorship and Eunice Paiva was a legit hero, or at least a legit martyr for the cause.

Best Picture that year:  Anora. No, I’ve never heard of it either.

Rating:  My main beef with this movie is its length—clocking in at 138 minutes, it seems to go on a half hour too long. Honestly, this is one of those films I have few complaints about. The filmmakers didn’t stray from the true story and the acting is great—each person in the family shows a bit of personality so you really believe they are a tight, loving family. This is the kind of movie that makes you feel lucky to be American—perhaps it should be required viewing for celebs who think we live in a dictatorship today or for those liberals out marching over how their freedoms are being taken away. Then again, my guess is many on the Left would hold up the Brazilian government as the equivalent of our own. I doubt the Paiva family would agree.

2023 Winner, The Zone of Interest

 

The Zone of Interest

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Distributed by: A24

Released: December 2023

Country: United Kingdom/United States/Poland

Eighty years after the liberation of the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camp, the name “Auschwitz” has evolved into a shorthand moniker for man’s inhumanity to man.  There have been enough shows and movies about such places that one could put on an extremely gloomy film festival on the subject.  We are all familiar with a few titles, perhaps:  Mainstream fare such as Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice, and the landmark 1970’s TV miniseries Holocaust; arty films like The Piano and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas; heck, the BFF list includes, by my count, four films, including the great Italian Life is Beautiful, that directly deal with the topic.  Now comes the latest Best International Film winner The Zone of Interest, set not inside but right outside the concentration camp, in the agricultural area intended to buffer the distasteful reality from the nearby Polish populace.  This movie is no less about the Holocaust than the gritty reality of those easily recognizable post-war news reels and pictures of hauntingly emaciated bodies piled up in overcrowded bunks and the piles of dead in their obscene graves.

Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss

The Zone of Interest is an unpleasant movie about evil.  Based on a 2014 Martin Amis novel, the film
focuses on real life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his young family.  Each morning, Höss grabs his lunch pail and goes to work at the camp to do what you do as a concentration camp commandant: running the place, figuring out new ways to be more efficient, dealing with the highers-up, that kind of thing.  Only we never actually see Höss at work—our story mostly takes place at his home just outside the walls.  We see Höss picnicking with the fam, swimming with the boys, joking around with the wife.  Some of it feels normal.  Höss’s wife Hedwig even has her mom over and enjoys showing off to her the house and garden, as if to say, “Aren’t you proud of what I’ve become, Mutti?”  Her mother is impressed except for the faint sound of gunshots and yells in the background, sounds that pervade throughout scene after scene.  Even more disturbing is the normalcy of the Holocaust brought into the lives of the Höss family.  The bucolic Polish setting is an ideal one for picnicking, swimming, and entertaining friends.  The children suffer in ways even their parents cannot see.

Showing mom the backyard pool

The fly in the ointment for this family comes when Höss is offered a promotion to oversee all the concentration camps, meaning he would have to move to Berlin.  When the wife hears of this, she says the same thing Karen Hill said to her husband in Goodfellas when he was considering witness protection—"It’s you they want, not me, right?”  She pushes him to ask if the rest of the family can just stay in the home, even if he has to leave.  He is hurt that it seems more important to her to keep the house than to keep him—another example of the human in the life of a man whose life’s purpose is inhumanity.

The Zone of Interest is a bleak, dreary movie, but at a running time of 105 minutes, it’s digestible enough.  Director Johnathan Glazer’s filmography is fairly sparse, including the dark crime comedy Sexy Beast and the weird drama Birth—The Zone of Interest outdoes those two in terms of gloom.  Even when husband and wife share a laugh, it doesn’t humanize them and in fact, they seem even more unlikeable.  Glazer goes heavy on the metaphor toward the end of the film, assuring us that Höss’s fate will be appropriate to his actions.

The Title: The movie is based on an English novel, with the English title.

Culture: Recently, I got a chance to tour the Dachau concentration camp, near Munich.  Dachau is smaller than Auschwitz, having been the one of the first and longest running camp.  The camp is just east of the smallish town of Dachau, and to get there you take a bus through some of the town.  The Bavarian town is a pretty little place with barber shops and clean streets and quaint storefronts, a sort of reminder that whatever was going on just a few minutes away in the camp, life went on as normal for many Germans.  The contrast between Dachau and Dachau reminded me of the contrast between Auschwitz and the Zone of Interest, the horrors of the Holocaust nestled right up against such a pastoral setting, presumably with the faint sounds and smells from the ugliness so nearby.

Agenda danger: Johnathan Glazer made a good film that won an award so naturally he took the

If you win, come up, accept your little award . . . and fuck off.

opportunity to preach about geopolitics during his acceptance speech.  Glazer bemoaned, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people." This virtue-signaling banality was in response to the state of Israel’s military response to the terrorist group Hamas unprovoked October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.  I’m sure it made Glazer feel good about himself and all, but it brought to my mind the Ricky Gervais Golden Globes monologue of a few years prior: “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world…”  If only more award winners took that advice.

Best Picture that year: Oppenheimer

Rating: A decent addition to the Holocaust sub-genre.  Spielberg called it the best Holocaust film since Schindler’s List, which to me just seems like a way to allow him to mention Schindler’s List.

2021 Winner, Drive My Car

Drive My Car

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Distributed by:  Bitters End

Released: August 2021

Country: Japan

A simple story with an array of complexities, Drive My Car is essentially about communication, or more specifically, our maddening inability to connect to each other in the ways that are most important. The story is of an actor/director who takes it upon himself to stage plays in which the actors speak different languages. The company rehearse their lines over and over to get the timing down, but the younger Japanese lead actor never really understands what all the other actors are saying, as they speak in Korean, Hmong, Cantonese, and even Korean Sign Language. It’s a Tower of Babel production of Chehov’s Uncle Vanya, a story about the wasting of life and love, which in many ways mirrors the events of Drive My Car.

Actor/Director Kafuku and Driver Misaki

Yūsuke Kafuku is the famed actor/director, the ultimate professional who seems to be walking through his life without aim. A tragedy from the past has caused a deep wound in his marriage to his beautiful and equally artistic wife, Oto. While the two are connected deeply, out of love and possibly out of the tragedy they shared, there is a wall between them, an inability to connect to each other in the ways that are most important. One way Oto does show her love is to create cassette tapes of dialogue for her husband, so that he can listen to the lines of other actors as he drives to and from work, with blanks left for him to speak in order to practice the play’s timing.

Kafuku agrees to direct Uncle Vanya for a theater company in Hiroshima, stipulating that the company obtain for him a hotel about an hour away from the theater so that he can drive his prized red Saab to and from each day, and thus be able to listen to his cassettes and perfect the production. However, the company tells him that for because of a past incident, the company requires that a hired driver be used to drive Kafuku each day. Kafuku is reluctant to cede control of the car, but sees that the hired driver, Misaki, a somewhat emotionally damaged 23-year old woman, is more than up to the task.

Another theme of the film is about letting go. The characters tend to be unable or unwilling to address their problems and because of this, they keep them inside as if their sufferings are treasured. We all do this and know others who do. And in seeing the Kafuku, Misaki, and other characters engage in this sort of self-damaging, or at least non-productive, behavior, we want to go up to them and shake some sense into them. They are good people who for one reason or another choose to hang onto what bogs them down.

From the play Uncle Vanya

Some two hour films seem like three; this was a three hour one that seemed like two. The director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, certainly earned his Best Director Oscar nomination for putting all these moving parts into one flowing story and giving us great visuals to look at along the way. Drive My Car has that rare quality in a film of making you think about it long after you are done watching it. The concept of thoughtfully saying what you mean and listening to what the other person is really saying a lesson for our times. More timeless is the need to let go—whether it’s letting somone else drive, forgiving someone who wronged you, or giving up that scar that represents the hurt you hold onto.

The Title: Japanese: ドライブ・マイ・カー, or: Doraibu Mai Kā

Culture: Hamaguchi uses culture and language masterfully to underscore his themes. The multilingual aspect of Kufuku’s productions are almost comical, as the actors have to pretend to understand what the other characters are saying. Featured are the play Waiting for Godot, by Irish playwright Samuel Becket, and Uncle Vanya, by Russian author Anton Chekov, and there are parallels between the characters of Chekov’ play and the characters in the film, much like 2017 winner from Iran, The Salesman. Subtly, even the titular car has meaning—Kufuku drives his pristine red Saab, which has its wheel on the left side of the car, through Japan, where oddly enough they drive on the left.

Agenda danger: There are layers upon layers of meaning in this profound movie but refreshingly, nothing overtly political.

Best Picture that year: CODA

Rating: Parasite won Best Picture a few years ago, the first non-English film to do so. Drive My Car, which is the better flim, deserved the nominations it got for that award, as well as Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

 

My BFF Wrap-Up: My Ranking

Starting in June 2016, I watched and reviewed every winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, or in short, Best Foreign Film (BFF), in reverse chronological order from the 2015 entry to the awards inception in 1947 (watching the 2016 winner at the end).  Part of the experiment was to see how many of these I would be able to find.  In most cases, I was able to borrow the DVD of each film from the Cuyahoga County Library system (a consistently top rated system in Northeast Ohio), and as things went further back in time, that meant using the inter-library systems CCL employs, SearchOhio and OhioLINK.  I did have to watch a couple on the dusty old VCR.  On two or three occasions when I couldn’t find the movie through the CCL system, I was able to get DVDs from the Cleveland Public Library.  Once I paid $2 to watch a movie on Amazon, and that was the grand total of money I spent on this project.  I did find a couple rare films online, having exhausted every other possibility.  Only once was I not able to find a film at all, at least with English subtitles, and that was 1950’s The Walls of Malapaga.  I watched it only in French with Portuguese subtitles, and decided to review it anyway.

My reviews were intended for people who don’t normally watch foreign films, a group that included me not all that long ago.  I found a lot of the movies worth watching, not just ones you might see at an art house, but movies I am convinced would have been mainstream American favorites had they been in English.  I also sat through a lot of tedious, self-admiring crap that got awards for having the right political or social view to the voters of the Academy.  But enough about The Sea Inside.  My goal was to make the reviews be entertaining, especially when the movie wasn't, and to give American viewer something they could relate to.

The list here is my amateurish attempt to rank what is perhaps the unrankable.  There are a variety of genres and so many different cultures represented here that it is almost unfair to compare them against each other.  But I did anyway, and the films are listed below from best to worst.  Click any movie title to read the review.  You can follow me on Twitter at @hawley5150.   

Enjoy!

1989, Cinema Paradiso, Italy

2006, The Lives of Others, Germany

1951, Rashomon, Japan

1998, Life Is Beautiful, Italy

1957, La Strada, Italy

1949, The Bicycle Thief, Italy

2011, A Separation, Iran

1975, Dersu Uzala, Soviet Union

1967, Closely Watched Trains, Czechoslovakia

1947, Shoeshine, Italy

1964, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Italy

1963, 8½, Italy

2009, The Secret in Their Eyes, Argentina

1972, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, France

1983, Fanny and Alexander, Sweden

1962, Sundays and Cybele, France

1965, The Shop on Main Street, Czechoslovakia

1986, The Assault, The Netherlands

2000, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Taiwan

1987, Babette's Feast, France

1960, The Virgin Spring, Sweden

2002 Nowhere in Africa, Germany

1958, My Uncle, France

1971, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Italy

1968, War and Peace, Soviet Union

1957, Nights of Cabiria, Italy

2007, The Counterfeiters, Austria

1974, Amarcord, Italy

1952, Forbidden Games, France

 
1961, Through a Glass Darkly, Sweden

2014, Ida, Poland

2016, The Salesman, Iran

1948, Monsieur Vincent, France

2008, Departures, Japan

2015, Son of Saul, Hungary

1970, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Italy

1985, The Official Story, Argentina

1969, Z, Algeria

1966, A Man and a Woman, France

1973, Day for Night, France

1990, Journey of Hope, Switzerland

1980, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Soviet Union

1982, Begin the Beguine, Spain

1993, Belle Époque, Spain

1959, Black Orpheus, France

1992, Indochine, France

1988, Pelle the Conqueror, Denmark

2005, Tsotsi, South Africa

1977, Madame Rosa, France

1981, Mephisto, Hungary

1954, Gate of Hell, Japan

2010, In a Better World, Denmark

1955, Samurai, The Legend of Musashi, Japan

2001, No Man's Land, Bosnia and Herzegovina

1976, Black and White and in Color, Ivory Coast

1979, The Tin Drum, West Germany

1996, Kolya, Czech Republic

1994,  Burnt by the Sun, Russia

1978, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, France

2012, Amour, France

2013, The Great Beauty, Italy

1997, Character, Netherlands

2014, The Sea Inside, Spain

1995, Antonia's Line, Netherlands

2003, The Barbarian Invasions, Canada

1991, Mediterraneo, Italy

1984, Dangerous Moves, France

1999, All About My Mother, Spain

1950, The Walls of Malapaga, France/Italy (not ranked)

FINE!