Parky At the Pictures (21/2/2025)

(Reviews of I'm Still Here; La storia del Frank e della Nina; and The Sloth Lane)

I'M STILL HERE.

A memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva provides the basis for Walter Salles's biopic, I'm Still Here. However, the director's own recollections of time spent at the rented Rio de Janeiro home of the Paiva family in the 1970s add a personal resonance to a tale of courage and resistance that also serves as a reminder to Salles's compatriots of what they stand to lose if they allow Brazil to drift back into right-wing authoritarianism.

Floating in the sea off Leblon Beach at Christmas 1970, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) seems to have it all. She is married to engineer, Rubens (Selton Mello), who agrees to let their five children keep Pimpão, the dog that had interrupted a game of volleyball. But a helicopter scudding towards the city serves as a reminder that Brazil is in the sixth year of a military dictatorship and, that night, Vera (Valentina Herszage) and her friends are stopped at a roadblock by soldiers searching for those who had kidnapped the Swiss ambassador.

Vera records everything on her cine-camera, but Eunice is worried about the company she keeps and suggests shipping her off to friends in London to keep her out of harm's way. Rubens treats her and siblings Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), Marcello (Guilherme Silveira), Nalu (Barbara Luz), and Beatriz (Cora Mora) to ice cream before she leaves. But he is also sheltering opposition activists without telling his wife, who believes that late-night phone calls are work-connected. He thanks his bookshop-owning friend for taking Vera and throws a farewell party for their circle, with everyone dancing before posing for a group photo on the beach.

Shortly after Vera's first letter and a spool of Super 8 footage arrives in the post, some men come to take Rubens away to give a deposition. He turns at the car to give Eunice a long, loving look before getting inside. A bearded man named Schneider (Luiz Bertazzo), who claims to be a parapsychologist stays with the family with a couple of henchmen and accepts Eunice's hospitality with grudging grace. She only tells Eliana what's going on, while housekeeper Zezé (Pri Helena) keeps the younger ones away from the intruders. After a couple of days, however, they are also taken in for questioning and are made to wear hoods on the drive to the army headquarters.

Denied access to her daughter, Eunice is informed that Rubens has discussed being a Labour Party congressman at the time of the 1964 coup. But Eunice insists that he has kept out of politics since returning from exile. She is surprised when her interrogator informs her that one of her children's teachers has been smuggling letters for Rubens to pass on to the terrorists threatening the state. Eunice denies knowing anything about them and feels afraid when she is bundled off to a cell, with the sounds of torture echoing down the corridors as Eliana is taken in for questioning.

A montage is punctuated by shots of Eunice scratching days into the paint of the cell wall before she is finally released. Her guard confides that he doesn't approve of what's going on and leads her through the courtyard without a hood so she can see Rubens's car parked there. On arriving home, Eunice scrubs herself in the shower and reassures her younger children, while being relieved that Eliana was only kept overnight. She is in contact with Lino Machado (Thelmo Fernandes), who wants to get a Paiva family photo on the cover of foreign newspapers to embarrass the regime into admitting that Rubens has been arrested, in the wake of fake Brazilian press reports that he had escaped during a routine interview. But Eunice also insists on putting pressure on the army by visiting the barracks to reclaim the red car and launching a habeas corpus suit.

Aware of being followed home by a Volkswagen, Eunice closes the usually open gates to the driveway. She tries to get money from Rubens's account, but is refused by one of his friends at the bank. Moreover, the teacher who was arrested with him and has since been released refuses to go public with a statement that they had been arrested in the same police car, as she has been too frightened by her time in captivity. When she asks one of her husband's colleagues what he had been up to, he assures her that it was nothing major and that Rubens will be home soon. But she is cross that they hid their message smuggling activities from their wives, even though they were trying to protect them.

Shortly afterwards, Pimpão is run over in the street and Eunice bangs on the door of the snoops who had sat and watched. Eliana is angry with her mother for hiding their ordeal from Vera and gets slapped for her pains. But a late-night envelope under the door provides the proof that Rubens had been arrested and Eunice asks Lino to turn up the heat on the government. But news comes soon afterwards that Rubens is dead and Eliana guesses what has happened when Eunice takes the kids to the ice cream parlour and she catches her mother gazing wistfully at the families at the other tables.

Lino doesn't want to broadcast the news, however, as they want to keep him alive in order to maintain the pressure on the authorities. Besides, they have no idea where Rubens's body has been deposited (forest, sea, mass grave) and Eunice reluctantly agrees, even withholding the truth from Vera when she comes home. She refuses to stop her kids from smiling when they are photographed for the local tabloid, however, as she starts reorganising her life to fit the new circumstances. Selling the land Rubens had bought to build a house, she pays off Zezé and relocates to São Paulo so that her parents can care for them while she goes back to college at the age of 48 to study law.

Eliana is livid at having to leave her friends, but Eunice insists they are involved in a process that requires them all to make sacrifices and she shows little emotion, as she clears her husband's study. However, she consoles her when she wanders alone to the tideline to take a last look at the sea, while Vera films their departure, as the timeframe rolls on 25 years and Vera (Maria Manoella), Eliana (Marjorie Estiano), Nalu (Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha), Marcelo (Antonio Saboia), and Beatriz (Olívia Torres) are all adults.

As Eunice lectures in 1996, news comes that Rubens's file has been found and the press is called so she can show off his death certificate and claim both victory and closure. Marcelo is now in a wheelchair after an accident (which didn't stop him from writing his bestselling memoir), while Beatriz is about to leave home with her boyfriend. Eunice places the document in the scrapbook she keeps in her study and watches a reel of Vera's home movies showing Rubens at the centre of a happy family day at the beach.

By 2014, Eunice (Fernanda Montenegro) has been living with Alzheimer's for 15 years. When the family gathers at her apartment, she remains quiet in her wheelchair. But Marcelo notices her focussing on the television, as a programme considers the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When she hears the name Rubens Paiva, a hint of recognition and a glint of steel return to her eyes.

Closing captions reveal that Eunice Paiva became an expert in indigenous rights after taking her law degree. Yet she was unable to attain justice for her husband, as none of the five men adjudged guilty of his death at the Rio barracks between 21/22 January 1971 has ever been made to answer the charges. These stark endnotes are far more impactful than the two codas that Salles appends to his core story. Given his association with the family, he has every right to show how Eunice rebuilt her life after enduring the unimaginable. But these segments feel more dutiful than dramatic, even though it's nice to see mother and daughter Fernanda Montenegro and the Golden Globe-winning Fernanda Torres sharing such a poignant role.

Made with reverence, insight, and intimacy, this film feels like it could have been made at any time over the last half century, as Salles has opted for a classical narrative style that owes more to New Hollywood than the Cinema Novo aesthetic that was common in Brazilian political film in the 1960s. Production designer Carlos Conti does a solid job in evoking a time and place, while cinematographer Adrian Teijido makes effective 35mm contrasts between the dazzling seaside sunshine and the single shaft of cell light that gives Eunice hope during her 12-day ordeal. But Salles (working in his homeland for the first time in 16 years) decides against giving the audience a hate figure to direct their disgust against, as this is less a lesson in Brazilian history than a study of a wife and mother trying to hold herself and her family together while also seeking answers and striving for justice.

This perspective enables Fernanda Torres to convey the extraordinary fortitude and strength that a seemingly ordinary woman like Eunice Paiva somehow managed to display. The stillness of her performance suggests both her resilience and her resourcefulness. Yet we don't learn a great deal about her past life, her relationship with Rubens (or his political career), or her mothering skills. Even her interrogation is stripped back, as Salles and scenarists Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega seek to avoid the platitudes of human rights cinema and the melodramatic temptations of having a middle-aged woman in a position of isolation and vulnerability in the face of a ruthless military machine that was prepared to murder thousands to protect its position.

Some might wonder whether the story lacks suspense, jeopardy, or dread. But doesn't seem to be what Salles was aiming to achieve. Dropping era-defining tracks by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Gal Costa into Warren Ellis's alternately mournful and brooding score, he seems to have wanted to remember a specific moment in the nation's history, while paying tribute to a woman he knew and admired and drawing on a sense of collective memory to warn his viewers of the price that had to be paid in order to return Brazil to democracy after decades of dictatorship. That he succeeds is admirable and that he should have done so while accumulating Oscar nominations is remarkable. It's unlikely that he will on 2 March. But, in many ways, he already has.

LA STORIA DEL FRANK E DELLA NINA

The latest offering from CinemaItaliaUK is Paola Randi's La storia del Frank e della Nina/The Story of Frank and Nina, a rite of passage that had been described as the tale of `three kids fighting against reality' by the Milanese director who made her name with Into Paradise (2010) and Little Tito and the Aliens (2017).

Nicknamed Gollum because he can only make guttural sounds rather than speak, 18 year-old Carlo (Gabriele Monti) befriends the bleach-haired Frank (Samuele Teneggi) after he stands up to the school bully who has taken exception to the graffiti tags that Gollum makes from the aphorisms that he is forever picking up. Frank is a drifter, who slips into classes at the university so he can learn a little about a lot. He also tells tall tales that Gollum never knows whether to believe (such as the time his grandfather disappeared from a hill where a fully grown tree had sprung up overnight).

Gollum lives in a crowded flat on an estate to the north of Milan, with a housebound father (Alessandro Corvo) and a mother (Margherita Di Rauso) who juggles a job and domestic chores. Living opposite is Nina (Ludovica Nasti), a Roma teenager who was married at 16 to the brutish Duce (Marco Bonadei), who is the father of her daughter, Maria, who Nina takes with her when she goes office cleaning, even though it's not allowed.

She is forever taking photographs with her phone and Gollum loves her view of the world and the fact she accepts him for who he is. He finds an old camcorder at an abandoned building and Nina uses it to film him tagging. When she asks him to babysit, he hangs outside the block where she's working so she can see that Maria is all right. However, she's nervous that questions will be asked about the bruises Duce causes on her face and that her employers will finding out she's Romani, as prejudice is rife across the city.

Gollum enjoys having a secret friend, but he has to share her when the handsome and charismatic Frank ghosts back on the scene and falls in love at first sight at a junkyard. As Nina wants to get her school diploma, Frank offers to teach her and gets hold of a desk to give her lessons in the derelict factory, with Gollum being left to look on helplessly, when not minding Maria or squirting profundities on convenient walls.

All is going swimmingly until Nina discovers she needs her mother's signature on the entry form and she wants nothing more to do with her since she married Duce and had a child underage. When Gollum offers to stand in as a guardian, he is rejected by the school principal. Worse follows when Frank and Gollum get caught in Nina's flat and he has to pretend he has come to see Duce because he wants to bring him in on a scheme to strip copper wire from the `industrial cathedrals' left empty on the outskirts of the city. Initially suspicious, Duce is won over when the cash starts rolling in and they form a gang that includes The Count (Giuseppe Dave Seke).

One night, however (which is actually the opening scene), a raid on premises with a nightwatchman goes wrong and the power supply is switched back on with The Count stranded in a flooded basement with an exposed wire under the water. Keen to flee, Duce leaves without Frank, who is trying to figure a way of saving his friend. Gollum feels bad for bailing on him and is relieved when he returns to the junkyard in the dead of night. But he has to watch the tenderness between Frank and Nina, who has snuck away to wait for him after having striven so hard to keep her emotions in check for fear of provoking Duce.

As Gollum narrates, the trio were closer than ever after this and Nina even agreed to pay a call on his grandfather (Bruno Bozzetto), a former police inspector whose house is covered with post-its because he is suffering from dementia. He is pleased to see Frank and dances to jazz with Nina and Maria before everyone has an afternoon nap. But they oversleep and have to flee when Frank's mother (Anna Ferzetti) comes home and pleads with him to stay so they can talk things out. The encounter shatters Gollum's illusion about Frank being a yarn-spinning magician with a solution to every problem and he pushes him away when he tries to explain. But all three end up clinging to each other, as Gollum manages to swear in his despair and they become closer still. That said, Nina refuses to commit to Frank because she knows nothing about him and isn't impressed when he claims people should be free to write their own stories.

When Duce is arrested, Nina gets into a panic because she fears that the authorities will take Maria away because she was conceived illegally. She visits her mother (Maria Halilovic) for advice, but they just argue and she berates Frank for trying to dupe Duce in order to keep seeing his wife. Gollum also needs his faith restoring in Frank and he walks three miles to the hill with the overnight tree and is pleased to see the initials Frank claimed to have carved on the trunk.

However, there is no sign of Frank or Nina anywhere and, when Gollum goes to her flat, neighbour hands over Maria. With nowhere else to go, he spends the afternoon with Frank's grandpa and they have to follow an online video to change Maria's nappy. Out of the blue, Frank leaves a voicemail to come to the station and Gollum realises that grandpa was a stationmaster not a cop when he dons his old uniform and joins them at Milano Centrale.

Frank and Nina have decided to run away and she instructs Gollum to claim paternity over Maria so she can't be taken by social services. However, as they check the departures board, grandpa gets over-excited at being back on his old stomping ground and he starts blowing his whistle. This attracts the cops and Frank's mother and he is about to surrender so Nina can escape when she grabs him by the hand and they scarper, leaving Gollum to wander away unimpeded and ponder a future as a father and a famous artist - because who knows how things might work out?

Lively without quite hitting its stride, this celebration of the power of words is one of those freewheeling features that feels like the director is making things up as they go along. There's a skittishness to proceedings, as though the nouvelle vague has collided head on with the New York No Wave. Indeed, at one point, it feels like Jim Jarmusch had sampled Jules et Jim, while the robbery sequences resemble a Guy Ritchie variation on Big Deal on Madonna Street. This is fine, as Randi flashes her cine-literacy in the same way as Gollum daubs his pensées. But, with the characters landing just the right side of being ciphers with shallow arcs, Matteo Carlesimo's handheld visuals and Andrea Maguolo's restless editing become a bit wearying, especially as there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the recurring shifts from monochrome to colour or from the everyday to the oneiric.

It also doesn't help that everything feels contrived, from Gollum's spray-can eloquence juxtaposing with his lack of speech to the free-spirited Nina's domestic entrapment, and Frank's ability to be a bohemian sprite on the pittance he makes writing essays for schoolkids. This doesn't mean that Samuele Teneggi's performance isn't alluring, as he brings to mind Christophe Lambert in Luc Besson's Subway (1985) in the refusal to conform that reflects the angst experienced by many Gen Z Italians struggling to find their niche in a society in flux. The same goes for Gabriele Monti, as the conflicted Gollum, and Ludovica Nasti, as the child bride/mother who sometimes feels like a fairytale princess waiting to be delivered from an ogre by the dashing hero. Yet, for all the evocative shots of the more rundown parts of Milan, this could do with a bit more neo-neo-realism to ensure that the splendid denouement is all the more affecting.

THE SLOTH LANE.

Following on from The Wishmas Tree, Combat Wombat (both 2020), Daisy Quokka: World's Scariest Animal (2021), and Combat Wombat: Back 2 Back (2024), The Sloth Lane is the latest in the Tales From Sanctuary City series of CGI animations for children. Having co-directed the previous entry, Tania Vincent becomes the first Australian woman to write and solo direct an animated feature and there are enough moments of wit and Tpoignancy here to suggest she's going to be busy over the next few years.

Adolescent sloth, Laura Romero Flores (Teo Vergara), can't resist telling customers at the family cantina about the Indiana Jones-like adventure that led to parents Luis (Ben Gorroño) and Gabriella (Olivia Vásquez as Gabriella) reclaiming the clan cookbook from the depths of a fiercely guarded cave. The old timers are happy to indulge her, but Gabi wishes she would slow down and stop idolising Dotti Pace (Leslie Jones), the glamorous cheetah who runs the Zoon Fuel fast food chain.

After their house and restaurant are lost in a storm, the family heads for Sanctuary City, where Luis tries to make a virtue of the fact that they can trade out of Gordito, the rickety snack van that they can park outside their new shack. He is also happy that he has space for his favourite flower and a small vegetable patch. But Laura wants to go and explore her new surroundings, unlike her indolent older brother, Mani (Facundo Herrera), who is content to lounge around at home.

Frustrated by Gabi's slow cooking methods, Laura resents being called `My Little Surprise' and having her ideas ignored when nobody comes to the snack counter in the first fortnight because everything has to be cooked from scratch. Luis promises his wife that they will move on if things don't pick up over the next week. But they are not the only ones with a cash flow crisis, as footfall is declining at Zoom Fuel and Dotti is furious with her assistant, Platy (Remy Hii), because her new Zoom Balls are so inedible that even a dung beetle spits one out during lab testing.

Laura cheers up when Arlo the kiwi (Matteo Romaniuk) and Kayleigh the bilby (Evie) invite her to join their cricket team and wheelchair-bound kangaroo, Coach Jerry, turns her into a fast bowler because she's got long arms. Her new friends also help her discover the city's food secrets. But Laura gets so carried away at watching Hasty Tasty Burgers being fired at customers with a large pop gun that she wanders into the kitchen of the Zoom Fuel outlet and causes chaos by disrupting the assembly line.

Dotti is furious that Laura manages to escape, but Gabi is no less cross with her daughter for sloping away and visiting what she considers to be a culinary den of iniquity. Nevertheless, Luis and Mani persuade Gabi to try Laura's idea of serving a single dish a day and all being responsible for a different part of its preparation to speed things up. Much to Laura's delight, her method works and word spreads so quickly about Gabi's delicious Hispanic dishes that Laura can't get away to cricket practice.

Intrigued by a news story about Gordito, Dotti comes to investigate. She is amazed by the flavours in Gabi's delicacies and offers to send over some of her staff in return for a peek at the cookbook. As this has been in the family for generations, Gabi refuses, much to Laura's frustration, as she is tired of working long hours. She also worships Dotti and can't believe that her mother distrusts her. When the cheetah bumps into the young sloth on a tram errand to the store, Dotti persuades Laura that everyone will benefit from sharing the recipes.

Despite a heart-to-heart with her father in his spice garden about diverging tree branches sharing a common root, Laura decides to steal the cookbook at creeps across town in the middle of the night to Zoom Fuel HQ. Overawed by the splendout of the inner sanctum, Laura is surprised to learn that Dotti cut herself off from her shopkeeping family because she was embarrassed by their old-fashioned values. When she has second thoughts, Dotti snatches the book and tosses Laura on to the street and she has an awkward time explaining her treachery when she's caught sneaking back indoors.

Luis is saddened by his wife and daughter arguing, especially as he realises that Laura doesn't understand the significance of Gabi's increasing memory lapses. He reminds Gabi that Laura is still a kid and has much to learn, but he doesn't downplay the folly of her actions in suggesting that they `season the mment' and take a family outing to retrieve the cookbook. Disguised as fast food mascots, the quartet get past the guards and Luis (who is a keen dancer) glides his way through the laser trail to open the safe and reclaim the book.

Unfortunately, Gabi puts her handbag on the reset button and Laura ticks her off for never paying attention to what she's doing. Although hurt by her child's words, Gabi reiterates the value of family and promises to be more sympathetic once they get home. However, not only has Dotti has called her henchmen, but the animal testers who have been hyped up by the chemicals in the Zoom Balls have also burst out of the laboratory and are lumbering towards the sloths like zombies.

Leaving her parents and brother to hold the fort, Laura finds her way into the kitchen and, following a slow food moment with a ripe avocado, she prepares a batch of wholesome guacamole that she can fire out of the burger guns to pacify the Zoom zombies. She also calls Arlo and he rallies the cricket team to bombard the marauders with healthy snacks. When he spots Luis and Gabi closing in on Laura after becoming the worse for Zoom, Arlo hurls an antidote to Laura, who catches it and returns her folks to normal.

Dotti is arrested by Chief Furbank (Dan Brumm), although she seems to have learnt her lesson when Laura hands her the snapshot of her family and she asks if she can ring them with her police station phone call. Gabi is distressed to see that her cookbook has been damaged in the chaos, but she insists that it's time for the family to start a new one that incorporate traditional and modern methods. Laura is overjoyed and rushes off to play cricket while satisfied customers join Gabi and Luis in dancing around the busy cantina.

For a CGI time-passer slotted into the schedules for half-term, this Aussie animation has as much on its mind as Adam Elliot's Memoir of a Snail. The imagery may be cookie-cutter, while there's nothing particularly unusual about such rite-of-passage themes as the value of friendship and home being where the heart is. But how many kidpix ponder the inexorable nature of time and the need to savour parental love, let alone corporate responsibility, animal experimentation, the potential risks of food additives, and the need to eat a balanced diet?

Tania Vincent packs all this and more into a picture that even champions women in cricket. The Romero Flores family don't look or act much like sloths, but the power-dressing Dotti with her rhinestones and cowboy boots shows a bit more imagination. Teo Vergara's Laura can be a little whinily one note, but Olivia Vásquez adroitly conveys the confusion and isolation of creeping dementia, while Leslie Jones is splendidly hissable as the tycoon who has allowed success to detach them from reality. Sound like anyone on the world stage who is one enchilada short of a picnic - not that they would see Mexican cuisine as the answer to their problems, of course!