Eva no duerme (2015) Online

I saw "Eva no duerme" at the Toronto Int'l Film Festival (September 2015). I was disappointed: the material is so incredibly rich, there's so much to the real story of Eva's corpse, and yet the director picked only a couple of moments to explore. That would be still good if the treatment of those moments were superb, but they are not. To begin with, he focused on the embalming of the body. The movie is billed as a real story, but the director wants us to believe it was done after the funeral and during the coup that sent Peron to exile; in the middle of chaos the embalmer (Arias) was forced to finish his job without electricity. A lot of emphasis on Eva's lace clothing and candles and little to the real story. There's another moment when a couple of navy personnel transport the body: they spent a huge amount of time talking nonsense and drinking and fighting. Who cares? It's irrelevant and absurd. Then there's the kidnapping of Aramburu by the Montoneros (supposedly because it's not explained): the acting is like watching high school students doing a melodrama. Not credible at all. A pity to see excellent actors like Gael Garcia Bernal and Imanol Arias being reduced to a few moments of inconsequential acting. A ripoff.

It is a fact. All the elements that constitute the body are the raw material also for the symbol. Of course it the psyche interfered... the well-known psychoanalytic obstacle... but even if a chaotic hyper-set such as an entire country is involved, if the past failed to get transformed into a symbol easily and correctly then, the dead return... the constant self-psychoanalytic engineering does not help anyone anymore... you cannot exceed the past just by gazing the future... the dead reject the rest unless they have been restored... in a proper, well-adjusted way... for those who lost the chance to become heroes, that manner is always complicated, enigmatic and mysterious... no one actually is aware of it... perhaps only time... yes, time only... Time which restores the injustices of the living towards the dead... even if that seems graphic, almost poetic... because vanity cannot be restored... it can only be remembered... with the fluidity of the blood... the firmness of the mind... mostly, the sanctity of the body...