Santa Evita (2022)
9/10
Volveré y seré millones, she was the daylight nightmare of the oligarchy!
21 October 2022
Evita's very existence and all it symbolically meant is intolerable for the Argentine elite. The "Argentine hate" is an elite hate, a right-wing hate, hate with a clear and precise purpose: to block, limit, reduce and if possible exterminate (in the absolute sense of the term) the expressions of the popular struggles. The series follows the seizure of the corpse of First Lady Argentina Eva Peron, for the people who loved her Evita, after her remains were embalmed and then exposed to the public for three years for a final farewell. Her remains, however, were stolen by the civilian-military dictatorship called "revoluciòn libertadora" and never returned nor placed in the family tomb.

It is precisely on the body of Evita / Donna that unfolds the myth that grew around it for over two decades. After a military coup in Argentina in 1955 overthrew the then president Juan Domingo Perón, Evita's corpse was hidden for 16 years to prevent it from becoming a symbol against the civic-military regime. A singular, unique, and at times surreal episode, which contributed to the creation of a further legendary aura around the figure of Evita for a woman who literally managed to go beyond her own death, in the everlasting memory of the Argentine and world people.

Anti-Peronism, the National-Catholic reactionaries, could not have Eva Perón celebrated as a saint, but all this work done for the concealment of the corpse had the opposite effect. In a non-chronological and non-linear narrative, Evita's life is told: orphaned by her father, at 15 she leaves everything and goes to Buenos Aires to try to break into the world of entertainment. She first became an actress, then a political and philanthropist, after the fortuitous meeting with the then colonel Juan Domingo Perón. The narrative moves back and forth, with pills and moments to reconstruct that fascinating and complex puzzle that was Evita's existence, as the title demonstrates, punctual and built on the body of the "b-word" as the big landowners oligarchs together with their military lackeys called her. The performers are never inclined to exasperate acting as often happens in Spanish language productions and offer some really suggestive sequences, like a scene that recalls the sanctity of the woman in the eyes of the people, given that she has always fought for their rights being also trade unionist.
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