Fernanda Torres was a comic star at home for much of the 2000s and then, in I'm Still Here, gave a performance built almost entirely out of what she declines to do. That restraint is her whole case, and it is a strong one.
Fi1m perspective
A magazine photographer comes to the Paiva house and asks the family to look sad for the picture. Eunice tells the children to smile. That is the moment in I'm Still Here (2024) we keep coming back to, and it is Fernanda Torres in one line: a woman who will not hand the men in the armchairs one more thing, played with the jaw and the stillness rather than the eyes. Walter Salles and his writers decided that Eunice would not be seen to break, and Torres makes that decision, in front of five children, every hour for 138 minutes. It moved us more than we thought possible, and what surprised us was how little she had to do to manage it.
Brazilian audiences would have been less surprised, or surprised differently. Torres has been working since her teens, on stage and on television from the late 1970s, with a film debut in Inocência (1983) and a lead in Eu Sei que Vou te Amar (1986) when she was twenty. A telenovela the same year, Selva de Pedra, did not suit her, and she kept away from leading soap roles afterwards. What she did instead was comedy. For much of the 2000s she was Vani in Os Normais (2001) and its film spin-offs, and later in Tapas & Beijos, and that is how a generation at home knows her. Between the jokes there were dramas, among them The House of Sand (2005), in which she plays two women across different periods, and Foreign Land (1996), the first of her three films with Salles.
The comedy matters, because it explains the drama. Sitcom work teaches an actor exactly how long a face can be held before the cut, and Torres brings that timing to Eunice: the pause before she answers an official, the half-second in which she decides not to cry in front of her daughter. Salles is the director who saw a dramatic lead in her after years of laughter, and she said afterwards that "It was marvelous to discover the power of restraint." The film bears her out.
Not everyone agrees. Some reviews found the performance too contained, one note held for two hours, and we understand the complaint without sharing it. Our own reservation was with the film rather than the actress. It is tidy; Eunice is right in every scene, and we wanted one moment where she was unfair from exhaustion. Torres could plainly have played it. Salles did not write it.
Where she goes next is the interesting question. A career that ran from a theatre school at thirteen through years of Brazilian comedy to this does not have an obvious sequel, and the danger is that she is now offered nothing but stoical mothers. We would rather see her handed something to laugh at again, on a set where somebody remembers she can.
Biography
Fernanda Torres is a Brazilian actress. She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965, the daughter of actors Fernanda Montenegro and Fernando Torres.
Torres won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986 for her performance in Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar. She has appeared in numerous films, including Four Days in September (1997), The House of Sand (2005) and I'm Still Here (2024), in which she played Eunice Paiva. For the latter role she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
She is married to director and producer Andrucha Waddington.
