'Eva Doesn’t Sleep': A Tale of a Corpse Adrift

Eva Perón (1919-1952), also known as Evita, was the wife of Argentina’s president Juan Perón from 1946 to 1952. Her legendary rise from an impoverished illegitimate daughter to First Lady has been retold time and time again across the world. In 1996, when Hollywood intended to produce the film Evita, many Argentinians reacted with anger. They couldn’t accept the portrayal of Eva as a flirtatious, manipulative opportunist. In response, the Argentine government produced its own film, Eva Perón: The True Story (1996) and released it ahead of the Hollywood version. Yet it’s undoubtedly Madonna’s Eva that’s remembered by Argentinian youths today.

If Hollywood’s Evita is a Cinderella-style tale of self-actualisation, then Argentina’s Eva Perón: The True Story is a nightmarish version of Sleeping Beauty. Indeed, Eva resembles the fairytale princess in some way, casting Argentina’s time – or rather, history – in suspended animation. In 2015, Argentinian director Pablo Agüero shot yet another version of Eva as Sleeping Beauty in his film Eva Doesn’t Sleep (Eva no duerme). However, the focus was not on Eva’s life this time, but on the epic journey of her corpse, turning it truly into a tale of a “beautiful corpse adrift.”

After dying at the age of 33, Eva's body went on an extraordinary odyssey:

1952–1954: After being embalmed by Spanish anatomist Pedro Ara, her body was put on public display.

1955–1957: Eva’s corpse got stolen. Following the military coup that overthrew the Perón regime, Juan Perón fled the country, and the ownership of any pictures of Eva, insofar as any mention of Eva or her husband, was criminalised by the new regime. President Pedro Eugenio Aramburu feared Peronists would steal the body and thus orchestrated what was essentially a ‘corpse heist’.

1957–1971: The body was transported to and secretly buried in Italy.

1971–1974: Juan Perón brought the body to Madrid.

1974: The corpse returned to Argentina. Juan Perón died in office in 1974 after reclaiming his presidential title in 1973, and the new president, his new wife Isabel Perón, had Eva’s body transported back from Spain, allegedly to stabilise a fragile regime.

1976: Following another military coup overthrowing Isabel Perón’s government, the junta buried Eva’s body six meters underground beneath cement in La Recoleta Cemetery in October.

After witnessing this posthumous odyssey, one can’t help but wonder: why do Argentinians harbour such a powerful obsession with the corpse?

Eva Doesn’t Sleep reconstructs the 24-year journey of Eva’s corpse using numerous perspectives such as documentary footage of Eva, her corpse, and the fight for her corpse to craft a vivid portrayal of the Argentinian ‘Oedipus complex’ / ‘necrophilia’. The film focuses on four pivotal moments surrounding the corpse — its embalming, abduction, transport, and burial. This is a severely underrated masterpiece, not in the least because of its heavily compressed narrative, strong symbolism, and experimental cinematography, of which can be daunting for general audiences. The film is utterly mysterious – everything from Argentinians to Eva is a riddle, and the love-hate relationship between the two is perhaps the greatest enigma of all.

Structured in three chapters, the protagonists are embalmer Pedro Ara, colonel Moori Köenig (who took Eva’s body to the undisclosed location under the President’s orders) and President Aramburu who was kidnapped by the revolutionaries respectively. The film also pays homage to horror, road, and political cinema. The first character to appear in the film is Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera who’s a notorious architect of Argentina’s “Dirty War”: the man responsible for finally burying Eva’s body under six meters of cement after the 1976 military coup. Having portrayed Che Guevara as well, famous Mexican actor Gael García Bernal’s take on the role of the admiral – a character who also serves as the film’s narrator throughout – such a story angle made Argentina appear like a ruined city after a whirlwind love affair.

This creepy, chilling, and revolutionary film thus unfolds from the perspective of the admiral. He refers to Eva as “That bitch!” and blames her for throwing the country into chaos, for letting “savages” (workers, Indigenous people, peasants) and “whores” (women) seize his beautiful capital. He represents a criticism of Eva’s “populism and clientelism”, while also hinting at a dictator’s disdain for the proletariat, Indigenous people, and women.

The first part of the film is about the embalming of Eva’s body, and it’s titled “Obsession”. The movie uses many close-ups to express the detailed and meticulous process of embalming, with Pedro Ara carefully handling every part of her body, from head to toe, as though his touch could stop time and grant immortality. His embalming is almost “fetish-istic”, transforming her corpse into something uncannily beautiful and eerily seductive.

Floating gently in red embalming fluid, Eva becomes a strangely alluring undead figure.

The camera then traces Ara’s footsteps down the corridors lined with giant images of Eva, eventually losing him in a labyrinth of time. Next, the camera pans from a painting of Madonna and Child to Eva’s face and exposed body lying on the mortuary table. Where the Madonna bares one nurturing breast for her Child, Eva is offering herself, it seems, to nourish a fractured young nation.

Archival footage of Eva’s fiery public speeches was intercut in this part of themovie, emphasising her raspy, powerful, and aged voice. This contrast reveals a paradox: in striving passionately for heaven, people plunge more quickly into hell. Or is it that what turns a country into a living hell is precisely people's enthusiasm in trying to build a paradise on earth?

The second section symbolises the fractionalising and conflict brought upon Argentina by Peronism. Set in 1956, Perón’s regime had just been overthrown by a military coup. A colonel and a soldier are ordered to transport Eva’s body to a secret location, and the entire section is focused on the journey in truck with only two people. The colonel treats the corpse coldly and harshly, but the young soldier is enamoured, reverent. When he opens the coffin and sees Eva’s face, he gazes at her longingly and even kisses her cheek. He corrects his superior, “This isn’t a corpse—this is her.” It then devolves into a violent struggle over the coffin. In fact, this serves as a metaphor for the long journey of Eva’s adrift corpse, and it mirrors the kind of fractionalisation, pain, and confusion Argentina has endured all those years. The admiral’s voiceover also underscores this chaos: “Her body turned us all into beasts. We’ve lost our minds. So we had to get rid of her.”

The third chapter is set in 1969, when Argentina was still under military dictatorship, and the Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros had kidnapped the president. This is based on real events and symbolises a struggle with escalating violence, bordering the nation on civil war. The Montoneros aimed to resist the dictatorship, bring Perón back to power, and establish national socialism. Their first public act occurred on May 29, 1970 via kidnapping and assassinating former President Aramburu, the dictator who had overthrown Perón’s regime. Although Eva was long dead by this time, her ghost still loomed over the entire political landscape. In this chapter, there’s a female guerrilla imitating/resembling Eva. She sits silently in the foreground like a ghost, her platinum-blonde hair and figure echoing the late First Lady. Strangely, she faces away from the camera, as though she’s also a part of the audience viewing this film. This implies how Eva is not gone, that she’s still lingering amongst us like a spirit.

The storytelling here is exceptionally concise. It uses a single corpse to thread together the three unending acts of 20th-century Latin America, namely, populism, guerrilla warfare, and military dictatorship. Through massive use of nightscapes, top-down lighting, archival footage, and extended takes, Eva Doesn’t Sleep portrays a South American nation frozen in time, trapped under the curse of “Sleeping Beauty”. Eva’s body is Sleeping Beauty herself, a beautiful corpse, a historical relic. She also represents both the utopia promised by Perón and the lingering, ghostly legacy of Peronism.

Yet a corpse is also a blank signifier, a vessel onto which any fantasy or agenda can be projected. Somewhere between the fairytale princess Cinderella and the nightmare-ridden Sleeping Beauty lies a woman who perhaps could never fully love herself. In Eva Perón: The True Story, there is a poignant moment when Eva expresses dissatisfaction with her body, and in retaliation, her body betrays her through cancer. Yet her body, which she despised in life, became a fiercely sought-after holy relic after death. The enchanting part of Eva Doesn’t Sleep lies precisely in its wry self-mockery, and the sly way the silver screen is transformed into a shroud.

Therefore, such an Oedipus complex on the mother suggests that Argentinians have yet to move beyond the stage of “patricide and marrying one’s mother”; while an obsession with the corpse represents an attempt by the powerless to restore a sense of control by transforming an uncontrollable other into a submissive, dead object.