À la carte (April 7, 2025)

On motherhood narratives in "I'm Still Here," "My Monticello," and "Jenisha from Kentucky," plus a palette cleanser.

A movie

It’s a rare night that I’m in the mood to sit down and watch a nearly two-and-a-half hour subtitled Brazilian film based on the true story of a leftist intellectual disappeared at the hands of a military dictatorship. But after a day of hanging with friends and joining thousands of people at the Hands Off protest in the Loop on Saturday, I felt unusually energized. And so as we drove home with Indian food, I turned to my husband and told him I finally had it in me to watch the award-winning 2024 film, “I’m Still Here.”

Based on the true story of the forced disappearance of former Congressman Rubens Paiva from his home in Rio de Janeiro in 1970, the film follows Paiva’s family through his unexpected disappearance from their bohemian beachside home (and into the present day via a moving, but unnecessary, epilogue). Directed by a childhood friend of a family, the film is largely told from the perspective of Paiva’s wife, Eunice, played by Fernanda Torres. While I knew that Torres had been nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Pavia’s wife and the mother of their five children, I had not heard “I’m Still Here”—the subject of much critical acclaim—discussed as a motherhood movie.

Bu “I’m Still Here” is very much a motherhood movie, as much as it is a story about the perils of dictatorship. It’s a political thriller told through the lens of the domestic. As the title suggests, it’s a story of the wife and mother left behind—after Rubens is taking in for questioning, never to return, it is Eunice who is left to both search for the truth and and to shield her children from it.

It’s a 1970s kind of motherhood. Until Rubens is taken, her beautiful Brazilian children run to and from the beach, unattended. Eunice is never not impeccably dressed and made up. A live-in maid, Zezé, appears to perform much of the household’s actual domestic labor. But the children are never far from Eunice’s mind. It’s Eunice who, in an early scene, convinces Rubens that they should send their eldest daughter abroad to London to keep her out of harm’s way; it is Eunice who has to experience the terror of being taken in for questioning alongside her second oldest daughter; it is Eunice who has to navigate the household expenses at a time when she can’t withdraw money from her husband’s bank account without his signature and without proof of his death.

Fernanda Torres, far right, as Eunice Paiva, alongside the Paiva family and friends in “I’m Still Here.”

And it is Eunice who figures it out, in a display of the sort of unsung strength and resilience of which only mothers are capable. Eunice is stoic in the face of unimaginable horror, nearly crumbling only behind a locked bathroom door when she returns home after being held in prison for weeks. (Apparently, director Walter Salles cut all scenes of Torres crying from the film after her son Marcelo said that his mother never cried in front of the family.)

Despite the darkness of its subject matter, “I’m Still Here” is an ambitiously gorgeous film. I’m not a cinephile and don’t have the vocabulary to fully describe what is happening here, but the portions of the film set in the 1970s are shot in 35 mm, which combined with the absolutely banging soundtrack and impeccable set design and costuming, creates an alluring nostalgic aesthetic. This contrast of light and dark—beautiful tanned children dancing around sunny Rio while the military rolls through—is part of what makes this film so powerful. Autocracy doesn’t change life overnight. It creeps in slowly, as a topic of dinner party conversation and late night phone calls, until you start to think it might be best to send your children abroad.

We’ve all seen our share of films about the 1970s Latin American dictatorships, but never have I understood so viscerally what it might feel like to be leading a beautiful life while the political winds shift in the background, to be trying to plan for a future while worrying what form the future will take. While we host friends and dance to Tom Zé, the plainclothes police are already here, people are already being disappeared in broad daylight on account of their political views, and the president thinks he wants to run for an unconstitutional third term. “I’m Still Here” is both a warning and an elegy.

A book

I’ve previously alluded to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse,” which I was recently introduced to in Rachel Yoder’s “Writing Motherhood” class. I finally read Johnson’s haunting short story collection, My Monticello, in its entirety and wowwwww. I will be holding on to her writing for a while. Set in a near-dystopian future (present?), Johnson’s stories consider what it means (and will mean) to be Black in America through an impressive range of experiences. Parenthood is the unifying current of these stories. There is an immigrant father who cannot bear to let his children know that he has lost his job in “The King of Xandria.” In “Control Negro,” there is a biological father who watches his son from afar. In “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse,” there is a single mother who dreams of owning a home close to her adult daughter, despite imminent societal collapse.

Johnson lives in Charlottesville, and it’s the 2017 Unite the Right rally that inspires the eerie titular novella “My Monticello,” in which a descendent of Sally Hemings rides out a white supremacist takeover of Charlottesville at a deserted Monticello alongside her grandmother, white boyfriend, and a bunch of neighbors.

If I had a book club, we would be reading My Monticello next. This is fiction at its best. For fans of Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, Claudia Rankin, and Ling Ma’s Severance.

An essay

I’m slowly working my way through “The Best American Essays of 2024,” thanks to my father-in-law who, unprompted, sent me the collection last week alongside “The Best American Short Stories of 2024” and On Freedom by

Timothy Snyder

.
(”Enjoy (two out of three of) these,” he wrote.) In a recent class,

Amanda Montei

introduced me to the practice of “reverse-outlining,” a way to study an essay’s structure, and so I’ve been reverse-outlining my way through the collection. But you don’t need to be a student of the essay form to appreciate the craft on display in these essays. I’m sorry to recommend something that is behind a paywall, but I was absolutely blown away by

Jenisha Watts

’ autobiographical essay “Jenisha from Kentucky,” originally published by The Atlantic last fall. This is another surreptitious motherhood story. Jenisha, now a senior editor at The Atlantic, didn’t grow up calling her crack-addicted young mother Trina “momma, and yet it is Jenisha’s mother who is at the center of this essay, as Jenisha, now a mother herself, grapples with the dysfunction of her upbringing, the sexual abuse, her separation from her siblings, and how she made her way to New York. This is a heavy piece, but a masterpiece. As a companion piece, I also loved

Kathryn Jezer-Morton

’s interview with Jenisha on “What We Owe Our Families—And What We Don’t,” which is relevant to any writer or person who has talked about their family in therapy.

A show

If you need a palette cleanser after all of the above, I have just the show for you. “Amanda and Alan’s Italian Job” is the BBC reality show you’ve never heard of, available for streaming on Kanopy and Amazon. It follows Amanda Holden and Alan Carr, two British D-list celebrity friends (an awards-show presenter and gay stand-up comedian, respectively), as they spend the summer renovating adjacent apartments in western Sicily, bought for a euro through an Italian redevelopment initiative. Part travelogue, part home renovation show, this show is so much funnier and weirder than what I can imagine on an equivalent American version. Led by hunky jack-of-all-trades project manager, Scott, Amanda and Alan spend the summer paddle boarding and traipsing between the small town of Salemi and Palermo, picking out tile, marble, and antiques. Perhaps my husband and I were predisposed to love this show because we honeymooned in Western Sicily and recognized many of the sights (it appears that Amanda and Alan stayed at one of the same hotels as we did), but I found it soothing and Carr’s campy humor is legitimately hilarious. For an overly tanned awards-show presenter with a garish aesthetic sense, Holden is also quite charming, as are the Sicilian craftspeople-turned-friends that populate the background of the show. We might be the shows only fans, but it got us through some dark weeks of 2025.