DRAMA; 2hr 18min (Portuguese with subtitles)
STARRING: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello
Unbeaten: Torres
Rio de Janeiro in the1970s is gripped by a military dictatorship, but the Paiva household is — mostly — sunshine and home movies. Life for papa bear Rubens (Mello), his unflappable wife, Eunice (Torres), and their five sparky kids is a cushy bubble: the Labor congressman turned engineer is geniality-plus while his mama bear right hand runs a buzzy, happy ship. With the beach at their doorstep, the days are a perpetual summer, sinister political background rumblings notwithstanding.
But then, out of a clear, blue Brazilian sky, Rubens is whisked away by an anonymous group of men for “a deposition” from which he will never return, vaporised like thousands of luckless others over two decades in a fog of official denial. With her resistance-friendly husband accused by the regime of terrorist affiliations, Eunice, too, finds herself twisting under its blowtorch, incarcerated and interrogated for 12 traumatising days, then released without explanation into a limbo that must from now on pass for normality.
Adapted from Rubens and Eunice’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir and directed by Central Station ’s Walter Salles, the screenplay from Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega is an homage to the selflessness of endurance. As emergent fighter Eunice, who parlays her law degree at age 48 into a campaign for victims’ rights, Torres is the doggedly beating heart of grace under pressure. (Sealing that emotive deal, Torres’s mother, revered actress Fernanda Montenegro, cameos in a poignant later scene as Eunice in old age.) Her children are her constant through every defining step; beacons of intention in a tyranny of loss.
