Latin America has seen no more charismatic a woman than Eva Perón, before or since her abrupt, tragic death from cancer at age 33. When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice released their instant-hit album of songs about her life, Evita, in November 1976, this Argentine neophyte-saint had been dead for almost a quarter-century, and her husband Juan Perón for just two years.

The triumph of Alan Parker's Evita lies in its controlled passion, and its translation of a sardonic, almost agit-prop '70s stage show into a poignant commentary on ambition, nationalism, and one woman's obsession with her long-lost father. A line by Tim Rice (sung by Ché) describes Evita as "a cross between a fantasy of the bedroom -- and a saint." So Parker's screenplay resists the temptation to idealize this people's heroine, played by none other than the Western world's foremost icon of female superpower in recent years‹Madonna. Evita retains the virtues of the original musical: the tawdry glamour, the dirgelike tone of start and finish, the symbiosis that bound Eva and Perón as intimately as any two tango dancers . . .

After so many failed attempts to bring Evita to the screen, Parker and his co-producers Andrew Vajna and Robert Stigwood took a commercial risk by abandoning conventional dialogue and retaining the "operatic" nature of the original, counting on one song after another to carry the story back and forth in time. Perhaps only The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in this most taxing of genres, has emerged so happily as does Evita, with Gerry Hambling's editing matching the music chord for chord and bar for bar. This loyalty to lyrics and score ensures that the music predominates over the small-arms fire, street riots, and sundry explosions that pockmark the history of Argentina between 1943 and 1952.

Just as the original stage production, directed by Harold Prince, chose ostentatious blacks and whites to establish a tone of garish destiny, so Darius Khondji's lighting and Brian Morris's production design confirm the elegiac nature of the material. The sepia browns, the olive, almost khaki hues of the interiors and the costumes serve to heighten the nostalgia that even Evita herself feels with each backward glance at her life. There's a torch in every hand, a sheen of light on every car, staircase, and cobbled street, as though the drama itself were unfolding on a limelit dance floor. This visual idiom achieves its zenith in "Waltz for Eva and Ché," permitting Madonna and Antonio Banderas to pass from passionate exuberance to chaste melancholy within a single scene.

Parker, who had approached the young British songwriters about making a film of Evita even before the show reached the London stage, directs with the rigor and commitment of a man who knows the material inside out. The clash between illusion and reality has long been his trademark, from Bugsy Malone and Fame through to Birdy and Come See the Paradise. Resisting close-ups (save for ironic effect), Parker refuses to let Evita tug at our heartstrings. The role of the detached, ironical Ché becomes crucial to the "distancing" effect required, while Sarah Monzani's makeup for Madonna renders the star not just a remarkable clone for Eva Perón but also a doll-like figure beyond contempt or corruption.

Shot on location in Argentina and Hungary, often in controversial circumstances, Evita transcends what was already the greatest of Lloyd Webber's musicals through its bold use of extras and, yes, the actual Casa Rosada balcony in Buenos Aires where Eva sings "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." Madonna may have little formal training as an actress, yet her image and her sensational singing identify her with this film as indelibly as Streisand with Funny Girl, Garland with A Star Is Born, or Dietrich with The Blue Angel. Bold and brassy in "Buenos Aires," ethereal in "You Must Love Me," tremulous in the reprise of "Don't Cry for Me. . .," she exults in her celebrity as Evita must have in hers. Antonio Banderas, sultry and strutting by turns, brings Ché right to the forefront of the drama.

Jonathan Pryce gives the character of Perón a tragic restraint, moving forever in the shadow of his wife and pronouncing his lyrics with the wistfulness of a man who somehow feels ashamed of being a dictator. And all credit to the wry-faced Jimmy Nail, watching Madonna belt out the exultant "Buenos Aires!" in a city bar in the knowledge that his small-town crooning can never live with her charisma.

For laserdisc collectors, this is also a release to cherish, for the sound has been recorded with subtlety, not just during the big numbers but also in the crowded exteriors, as the persistent, incantatory cries of "Eva! Eva!" from 4,000 extras overwhelm the hoarse rhetoric of President Juan Perón.

-- Peter Cowie

Peter Cowie is the editor of the annual International Film Guide, and author of several books on the cinema, including studies of Welles, Bergman, and Coppola. He is International Publishing Director of Variety.

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