Mar del Plata contender attempts to be insightful but only manages to get it all wrong
MAR DEL PLATA — First, the facts. Shortly after Eva Perón’s death in 1952 at age 33, her body was embalmed by Dr. Pedro Ara Sarria. It was to be placed later in a memorial that was being built in her honour, so in the meantime it was displayed at the CGT building for almost two years. But, in 1955, president Juan Perón was overthrown in a military coup by the Revolución Libertadora. Perón fled the country and couldn’t make the necessary arrangements to secure Evita’s body, which was stolen by the military on the night of November 22, 1955. From then on, the whereabouts of the body remained a mystery for 16 years — although it’s known that in 1957 it was buried in Milan, Italy, under the name of María Maggi.
Then, during 1971-1973 military dictatorship, General Lanusse ordered that Evita’s body be exhumed and given to Perón in Puerta de Hierro, Madrid, in September 1971. Afterwards, in November, 1974, President María Estela Martínez de Perón brought it to Argentina and placed it in the Olivos presidential residence. And with the advent of the last military dictatorship in 1976, Evita’s body was given to her family, the Duartes, who buried it in the Cemetery of Recoleta, where it has remained until today.
Based on those facts, there’s an outstanding short story by disappeared Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh called Esa mujer; there’s Evita. La tumba sin paz, a successful and inspired documentary directed by Tristán Bauer and scripted by Miguel Bonasso that also exposes the history of Peronism; and Santa Evita, a remarkable book by Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, which imagines new stories regarding the corpse.
And now there’s Eva no duerme (Eva Doesn’t Sleep), a pitiful fiction film by Pablo Agüero, currently running in the international competition of the Mar del Plata Film Festival and also commercially released today throughout the country.
Agüero’s outing features archive footage and is divided into three episodes: El embalsamador (The Embalmer), El transportador (The Transporter) and El dictador (The Dictator), respectively devoted to Spanish anatomist Pedro Aria Sarria, Colonel Moori Koenig, and General Aramburu. Admiral Massera is the narrator of the overall film and is played by Gael García Bernal. Other members of the cast include Daniel Fanego, Denis Lavant, Imanol Arias, Ailin Salas, and Miguel Angel Solá — all of them good actors in a movie gone awry. For Eva Doesn’t Sleep attempts to be an insightful, aesthetically daring cinematic piece that reconstructs and re-imagines possible scenarios centred on Evita’s corpse. And it gets it all wrong.
For starters, there’s an unbearably solemn tone that wants to be transcendental and yet it only sinks the film into dreadful monotony and artificiality — as an example, the voice over by Gael García Bernal, whom we only see in a few close-ups and nothing but, is a pain in the ears. Likewise, the pretentious dialogue accompanied by wooden acting enhances the general lack of verisimilitude. It’s true that the register is not meant to be realistic, but it’s not formally challenging or avant-garde either. In fact, it’s plainly risible and far from any kind of poetry. Let alone the deliberate heavily theatrical mise-en-scene that wants to be appealing and modern and only makes matters worse — we are certainly not talking about Derek Jarman’s Edward II, for instance.
As far as the archive footage goes, let’s say there’s nothing new under the sun. This material is well known and does nothing for the sake of the story, neither in informative terms nor in stylistic ones — in fact, it crashes big time against the fictional stories. So why include it? To give the film an air of the time? To provide a historical context? Either way, it doesn’t make any sense.
And then there’s the pacing. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that during Eva Doesn’t Sleep, you are bound to fall into a heavy stupor not long after the movie starts. And to think that the real life events have some much potential for a good movie, but for that you need a good script and a good director, two factors that are obviously missing here.
