This powerful Oscar-nominated drama is about the real-life kidnapping and murder of a former congressman in 1971, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Up for best picture, best actress and best international film, it’s made by the Brazilian director Walter Salles, who got to know the subject’s family as a boy.
This isn’t “another South American dictatorship drama”, however; instead, it is one of the great films about motherhood, because once the politician has been snatched from the family home in Rio de Janeiro, the focus turns to his wife, Eunice Paiva (the “phenomenal” Fernanda Torres), and what follows as she searches for justice and closure over the next 40 years. “Best actress Oscar for Torres? Worth a flutter.”
Torres gives a performance of great “subtlety and dignity” as a woman having to shield her five children from despair, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But her character is so self-controlled – she doesn’t cry once – that the film feels “numbed and sometimes even strangely placid”. Still, “this might well be precisely the experiences of the families of the ‘disappeared’, their emotional responses stunted and amputated by the state”.
For me, the standout moment of this “superb” film comes when the family relocates to São Paulo, and one of the couple’s daughters sits on the doorstep of the house they’re about to leave, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Her face “a mask of grief”, she leans “towards the now empty rooms as though drawn by the magnetic pull of happier times”. It was in this moment, we later learn, that she “‘buried’ her father, realising then that he wasn’t coming home”. I have watched the film three times, and “this achingly sad single shot has broken me every time”.