Evita: The Secret to the Most Balanced Portrait of Argentina's Most Polarizing Figure Lies in the Script — Montes-Bradley's First in English

Heritage Film Project Editorial

There are few twentieth-century political figures more thoroughly mythologized than Eva Duarte de Perón. She has been a saint, a whore, a martyr, a fascist, a champion of the poor, an embezzler of public funds, a fashion icon, a populist demagogue, a feminist pioneer, and a Broadway musical. The competing portraits are so loud and so durable that any documentary attempting to address her life faces an immediate problem: which Evita are you making the film about?

The 2005 documentary Evita takes a position by refusing to take one. The film was originally blacklisted in Argentina precisely because of this refusal — a country that has spent seventy years insisting that you must love or hate Evita does not always know what to do with a film that simply asks you to look at her clearly. The result has been the most widely viewed film in the Heritage Film Project catalogue, and arguably one of the most balanced portraits of the woman ever committed to screen.

This is a critical examination of the film itself — its structure, its argument, and what it accomplishes that earlier and louder treatments have not.

The Structure: A Life Shaped Like a Performance

The most striking decision in the film is structural. Rather than imposing a thesis at the outset and marshaling evidence to support it, the script tracks the actual chronological shape of the life — and discovers, in tracking it, that the life itself was already structured like a performance. Eva Duarte was an actress before she was a political figure. The script never lets you forget this, and never moralizes about it either.

The opening sequences establish the conditions that the rest of the film will simply observe: an illegitimate birth in 1919 at the Hacienda La Unión, where Juan Duarte spent six months a year away from his legal wife and family, fathering five children with his employee Juana Ibarguren. The youngest was delivered by a Mapuche midwife — a detail that places Evita's origins not within the European-immigrant Argentina that would later mythologize and reject her, but within the indigenous Argentina that the white settlers from Buenos Aires had displaced. Few biographical accounts of Evita open with this detail. It matters. It establishes from the first paragraph that the film is not interested in tidy national narratives.

What follows is a chronicle of humiliation: the bankruptcy that drove the family to Los Toldos, the father's death in a car accident when Evita was seven, the family's degraded reception at the gates of the Duarte household for the funeral — the unwelcome reached Duarte's gates, the script says, they were insulted and humiliated — and the social cruelty of provincial life in 1930s Argentina, where illegitimate children were treated as cursed by classmates and neighbors alike.

The film does not present these episodes as explanations or excuses. It presents them as the conditions out of which a particular kind of person was built. The connection between the seven-year-old taking a last and unique glance at the father she hardly knew and the First Lady who would eventually have her own birth certificate destroyed and rewritten is left for the viewer to make. The film trusts the viewer to make it.

The Political Context Without the Polemic

One of the film's quieter virtues is its treatment of the political environment in which Peronism took root. Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s is often presented in two competing simplifications: as the victim of imperial powers, or as a willing collaborator with European fascism. The script does neither. It offers, instead, a careful historical account.

The 1930 coup led by General Uriburu is named for what it was: pro-fascist, the inauguration of an era of military intolerance and pseudo-democratic governments. The script notes that the Argentine armed forces were clearly influenced by their German and Italian counterparts and found inspiration in the standoff of the latter against the perceived threat of liberals, Jews and capitalism at large. This is not subtle and it is not meant to be. It is the historical record. By 1944, when Perón ascended through the ranks under Ramírez and Farrell, Argentina was, in the script's phrase, marching to the drums of fascist Rome and Nazi Berlin.

Then comes a passage that would have been unthinkable in any state-sanctioned Argentine documentary about Evita: the Rainbow Tour of 1947. The film documents the meetings without commentary — Franco in Madrid, the Vatican requesting sanctuary for Croatian war criminals who would later join former Nazis already in Argentina training the federal and state secret police, Salazar in Lisbon, Umberto of Savoya the deposed Italian king and former Mussolini sponsor. And then Zurich, where bankers hoped to capitalize on the growing personal fortune of the presidential couple. The film notes that since 1945 the U.S. State and Treasury Departments had conclusive evidence of illegal dealings and transfers of gold and currency between Argentina and Swiss banks.

This is not editorializing. It is a series of facts placed in sequence. The reader of the script — or the viewer of the film — draws the conclusions. The discipline of the writing is in what it refuses to add.

The Performance of Power

The film's central interpretive move, and the one that makes it work as both biography and political analysis, is its treatment of Evita's First Lady period as a sustained theatrical performance — produced, directed, costumed, and lit by an apparatus of state propaganda that the script names with precision.

The names matter. Oscar Nicolini, Juana Ibarguren's boyfriend, becomes director of the National Post Office. Oscar Lomuto becomes Under Secretary of Information. The playwright José Muñoz Aspiri is appointed head of propaganda — a playwright, the script notes, the detail doing its own work. Juan Duarte, Evita's brother, becomes Perón's private secretary and the man in charge of the Colonel's transactions both public and private. The state was being staged. Evita was its star.

The script tracks the costuming changes with unusual attention. Before the Rainbow Tour: jewelry, furs, designer clothes, the look of a woman who had been denied everything and was now claiming all of it. After the tour, on the lesson she learned in Europe: simplicity. The tailored suit. The chignon. The signature look. The transformation is not described as cynicism. It is described as craft. She had learned what worked. She adjusted accordingly.

The propaganda machine receives the same forensic treatment. Public school textbooks teaching children that my mommy loves me, Evita loves me too. Santa Evita personally bringing toys printed with regime propaganda. The renaming of the territory of La Pampa after the First Lady. The new religion, as the script bluntly calls it, of Peronism, with Evita as the apostle of the dispossessed.

A lesser film would have presented all of this as straightforward villainy or as straightforward populist devotion. Evitapresents it as both at once, because it was both at once, and because the central historical question is not which of these things was true but how they could be true simultaneously and how a society could organize itself around the contradiction.

What the Film Refuses to Decide

The most distinctive quality of the script — and the source of its power — is what it refuses to adjudicate.

It does not decide whether Evita's love for the workers was sincere or performed. It documents both possibilities. It shows her spending hours in genuine engagement with union delegates, listening with attention, deploying a streetwise intelligence that was the product of her own working-class origins. It also shows the Eva Perón Foundation bankrolled with extorted donations and federal resources, presided over by Evita for life, with no oversight and no accounting. Both of these things are true. The film leaves them both standing.

It does not decide whether her renunciation of the Vice Presidency in August 1951 was strategic, forced by the military, or compelled by her cancer diagnosis. It documents all three pressures operating simultaneously and lets them coexist.

It does not decide whether the cult of personality was imposed from above or rose from below. It shows both forces at work and refuses to resolve their relative weights.

This refusal is not evasion. It is the most honest position a documentary about a figure like Evita can take. The Manichaean accounts — saint or devil, victim or villain — are easier to make and easier to watch, but they falsify the historical record. The actual woman was a particular product of a particular Argentina at a particular moment, and that woman was capable of acts of genuine generosity and acts of genuine cruelty, often in the same week, often for related reasons. The film honors that complexity.

The Corpse That Would Not Rest

The final third of the film, devoted to the macabre posthumous odyssey of Evita's embalmed body, is where the script's literary qualities are most apparent. The material itself reads like Latin American magic realism — except that all of it happened.

The 1955 military coup that ousted Perón. General Aramburu's order to seize the corpse. The hiding of the body in Major Arandía's attic, where one night, hearing sounds from above, the major reached for his weapon and shot in the dark, killing his pregnant wife. The Vatican's complicity in the plan to ship the remains out of the country. Twenty-five identical coffins, twenty-five collaborators, sworn to secrecy. The corpse arriving in Genoa in April 1957 and being laid to rest in Milan under the fictitious name María Maggi de Magistris.

The kidnapping of Aramburu by the Montoneros in 1970, demanding the return of the body. The execution of Aramburu when he could not deliver. The 1971 exhumation under General Lanusse's Operation Return. The body's arrival at Perón's residence in Madrid, where the deposed leader was now living under Franco's protection. Perón's third presidency, his death of natural causes, the inauguration of his third wife Isabelita. The Montoneros kidnapping Aramburu's corpse a second time and using it to force the return of Evita's body to Argentina. The 1976 coup. The current resting place at Recoleta Cemetery, next to Aramburu and the mausoleums of the most prominent families of Argentina.

The script handles all of this with a tone that is at once factual and faintly amused — the only register adequate to material this surreal. The writing does not overplay it. The events overplay themselves.

The grimmest and most telling detail is the desecration of Perón's grave on at least two occasions, including the theft of his hands. The film offers this without comment. It does not need a comment.

Why It Was Blacklisted

The film's troubled reception in Argentina makes more sense once one understands what it does and does not do. Evitarefuses to deliver either of the two products that the Argentine cultural market has historically demanded: the saint or the demon. It does not validate the Peronist mythology of Evita as the spiritual mother of the nation, sacrificed by oligarchic enemies. It also does not validate the anti-Peronist counter-mythology of Evita as a vulgar opportunist who cynically manipulated the working class. It treats her as a historical figure who must be understood within the conditions of her time, including the conditions of Argentine fascism, the influence of Mussolini and the Vatican, and the genuine social grievances that Peronism addressed however imperfectly.

This kind of historical seriousness is, in the Argentine context, a political position. A balanced portrait reads, to partisans on both sides, as a hostile portrait. The film was therefore unwelcome in the country that produced it — and embraced, eventually, by international audiences who could see it for what it was.

It is now the most widely viewed film in the Heritage Film Project catalogue. The reasons are clear enough. The world has not run out of polarizing political figures who require careful, unflinching, even-handed examination. Evita offers a model of what that kind of examination looks like.

A Riddle Hidden in the Name

The script refers to the fictitious name María Maggi de Magistris, faithfully translating the historical record as it stood in 2005. The most credible Spanish-language scholarship has since gone further: there is reason to believe that the woman never existed at all. The supposed date of death recorded on the burial paperwork — February 29, 1951 — falls on a day that does not exist, since 1951 was not a leap year. A real Italian widow with that name has never been documented in birth, death, or original burial records. The identity appears to have been fabricated from scratch by Argentine military intelligence, vouched for by a complicit priest, and accepted in good faith by Italian cemetery staff who had no way of knowing they were burying the most famous woman in twentieth-century Argentina.

If the name was invented, then someone chose it. And here, without scientific evidence and offered as nothing more than a private reading, the director likes to believe the following.

Read aloud in Spanish — the language of those who fabricated the documentation — María Maggi de Magistris sits one syllable away, in each of its parts, from another phrase that any native Spanish speaker would hear immediately: María Magia de los Magistrados. Mary, the Magic of the Magistrates. Mary, conjured by the authorities. Mary, the trick.

This is speculation. It cannot be proven. The men responsible for Operation Cadaver are dead, and they did not leave annotated drafts of their forgeries. But the phonetic resonance is too perfect to read aloud without hearing it, and the date of death is impossible enough to suggest that whoever was constructing the paperwork was either careless in interesting ways or signalling, perhaps to themselves, that the entire document was a fiction. A nun escorted the coffin. A priest blessed the burial. Cemetery staff tended the grave for fourteen years. And underneath all of it, possibly, hiding inside an invented Italian name pronounced by people who were not native Italian speakers, a small Spanish-language confession: the magic of the magistrates. The trick.

It is a reading. Nothing more. But it is the kind of reading that the script's underlying skepticism — its refusal to accept official stories at face value, its attention to the exact words used by power — invites the viewer to perform on the historical record itself. Evita is, among other things, a film about the gap between what regimes say and what they actually do. The name on the headstone in Milan may have been part of that gap, hiding in plain sight for sixty-eight years.

A Note on the Writing

The script of Evita was the director's first screenplay composed in English rather than Spanish. The choice was deliberate, and it may be the single most important decision behind the film's distinctive evenness of tone.

Writing the life of Argentina's most contested figure in a second language imposes a discipline that a native-language script cannot easily replicate. Every claim has to be weighed twice. Every adjective has to be justified. Every assumption inherited from the Argentine cultural conversation — the idiomatic shortcuts that signal which side of the Peronist divide a writer stands on — has to be reconsidered as it is translated into a more neutral register. The mythologizing vocabulary that surrounds Evita in Spanish does not survive the crossing into English unchallenged. Words like abanderada, santa, yegua, resentida — the entire lexicon of partisan invective and partisan worship that has structured Argentine writing about Evita for seventy years — has no automatic English equivalent. The writer has to choose, sentence by sentence, what is actually being claimed.

The result is a script that reads, in its English original and in subsequent Spanish translation, as something genuinely unusual: a serious historical account written without inherited reflexes. The unusual evenness of tone that distinguishes the film from earlier Spanish-language treatments owes a great deal to that linguistic distance. A subject this overdetermined sometimes needs to be approached from outside the language of its mythology in order to be seen clearly.

This is not an argument that the second language is somehow truer than the first. It is an observation about the conditions under which balanced historical writing becomes possible at all. When a subject has been narrated to exhaustion in one language, switching languages can be a way of recovering the capacity to look. Evita is, among other things, an example of what that recovery makes possible.

Evita (2005) is a Heritage Film Project production directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. The film is currently available in YouTube.