If you want to learn about the sequence of events behind one of the darkest moments of Argentine history, this isn’t the movie to watch. Eva no duerme (2015), translated into English as Eva Doesn’t Sleep, from director Pablo Agüero, is not interested in teaching history.
Film about Eva Peron examines her power as a female icon
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If you want to learn about the sequence of events behind one of the darkest moments of Argentine history, this isn’t the movie to watch. Eva no duerme (2015), translated into English as Eva Doesn’t Sleep, from director Pablo Agüero, is not interested in teaching history.
No, this film—with its array of painfully detailed and executed cinematography and characters that leave you feeling simultaneously hungry and repulsed—sets out to demonstrate the power of symbols and without a doubt succeeds.
… the most dangerous and feared is never the concrete but rather the abstract—the idea.
Spanning 22 years and three distinct chapters, Eva no duerme opens with General Emilio Massera, played by renowned Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, narrating his long search for Eva’s corpse with blatant misogynist hatred marked by his refusal to name her directly, referring to her instead as yegua and hembra. General Massera is not the only man in the film who feels taunted and haunted by this woman. In the chapter “The Embalmer,” the viewer is taken to meet Doctor Pedro Ara Sarria, Eva’s embalmer, who appears to be on the edge of hatred and obsession with Eva’s corpse and wants her to lose that “whorish expression.” Similarly, the second chapter, “The Transporter”, features two military men tasked with stealing and hiding Eva’s corpse and their own disrespect of her corpse—even borderline necrophilia in some scenes—in their attempts to demonstrate their masculinity.
Although the film focuses on men—rebels, militants, young or old, Peronistas or fascists—the epicenter unsurprisingly is Eva. However, it is not necessarily her corpse that takes center stage but rather her legend and symbolism that seems to force men to cross boundaries; they fear her to the point where they must hide and “exile” Eva’s body in the hopes of squashing her legacy. Focusing in a time period of widespread repression in Argentina, Eva no duerme takes what was a very violent, sexist, fascist, and Catholic dictatorship and demonstrates its delicacy when examined in the abstract. Massera, for example, considers himself a national hero; he has control of Eva. Though he might feel victorious, this victory seems just as fragile as the corpse.
With an intense focus on character complexity and interactions developed with mise-en-scène, Eva no duerme is a difficult film to categorize and digest. It cannot be easily labeled historical as it concentrates not necessarily on providing historical facts but rather focuses on delving beyond the mechanics of politics. And behind these politics and policies, Agüero shows that the most dangerous and feared is never the concrete but rather the abstract, the idea. The idea of Eva, even to this day, has not disappeared.
Eva no duerme is part of this year’s Latin American Film Festival at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center through Oct. 5. This film has one last screening tonight, Sunday, Sept. 18, at 9 p.m. For tickets and information about the festival, check the AFI Silver website.
—Elizabeth Marin
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