EVA

In a not-too-distant future, robotic research is advancing in the design of specimens that perfectly replicate human features. Cybernetic engineer Alex Garel, recently returned to his father's home in Santa Irene after more than ten years away, believes that a robot can develop memories and perhaps a soul and is looking for a child to serve as a model for his robot prototype commissioned by a robotics company. However, Alex cannot find the ideal child because those proposed to him, in his opinion, are boring. One day, Alex meets Eva, a particularly curious and outgoing girl, outside an elementary school and decides that she will be the model for his robot. But soon, Alex discovers that Eva is his niece, the daughter of the woman he was in love with during university and who instead married his brother. In recent years, Spain has made significant strides in cinema. Despite an economic situation that echoes crises even in the country of the movida, the film industry is in a productive ferment with a consolidation of the genre system capable of competing with Hollywood and qualitatively surpassing the product from across the Atlantic with ease. "Eva" represents the Iberian foray into the robotic strand of science fiction, as well as the feature film debut of director Kike Maillo. A strand with illustrious relatives in past or more recent American cinema but few points of comparison in Spanish and perhaps even European cinematic tradition. With more than a few similarities to "A.I. – Artificial Intelligence" by Steven Spielberg, from which it borrows the idea of the centrality of the infant robot and the search for humanity even in a cybernetic being, "Eva" nevertheless manages to develop a very personal and profound discourse that places human relationships at the heart of the story. The story of Alex Garel, played by the excellent Daniel Brühl ("Inglourious Basterds"; "Intruders"), an engineer wounded by past sacrifices and perhaps by the wrong choices he made, is well-articulated and touching in its developments. By placing Alex as the protagonist rather than his creation, the film manages to offer a unique perspective on the story, differentiating "Eva" from similar films that tell of robots and feelings. Alex Garel is a sort of modern Frankenstein, obsessed with the search for perfection and the creation of a being that represents an ideal distant from him. Obviously, as often happens when one tries to play God, this entails consequences that take on tragic overtones, which in "Eva" translate into a second part that takes on a melodramatic hue. The tonal shift in Maillo's film is rather unexpected, and although it represents a perfect evolution of the story, it can initially startle the viewer. The plot twists are not really such, but the entanglements, sacrifices, losses, and choices represent an example of excellent emotional storytelling. The screenplay by Sergi Balbel is classically structured in three acts, each of which is quite recognizable in the journey the protagonist takes through the story, but the intelligent use of emotions and the excellent character construction, not just of the main characters, make "Eva" a gem of writing and staging. Very good is the idea of not giving in to the science fiction stereotype of futuristic places and times. There is no precise temporal setting for the film; the viewer assumes a not-too-distant future given the subject matter, but there is no dating. People coexist with robots, using them as pets or collaborators in daily chores, and a law regulates their coexistence with humans, but the story of "Eva" is set in a scenario very similar to our present, without any technological excess that characterizes progress, except for the robots, of course. No flying machines, eccentric outfits, or excessively vertical architecture, rather the setting of the film is an ordinary provincial town, surrounded by countryside and touched by snow. A timeless place that has a strange effect like this, tied to a science fiction story, an excellent oxymoronic device that manages to distance this film from its epigones and predecessors. The search for a soul even where it could/should not be is somewhat the leitmotiv of the film. Garel is convinced that even a cybernetic organism is capable of developing and preserving memories, and the holographic brain of his creatures, composed suggestively of synapses that like chests contain glimpses of the robot's life, is the visual demonstration of this. Obviously, Garel's is not a certainty but a search for the truth, a continuous testing that can refute his thesis. What does a robot see when it closes its eyes? Does a world made of memories open up for it as it does for humans? Around this question, Garel's obsessive research is built, which perhaps will find an answer in the suggestive image that closes the film. In the cast of "Eva," besides the already mentioned Daniel Brühl, there is the beautiful and talented Marta Etura, recently seen in other top Iberian films "Cell 211" and "Bed Time," and of course the very young Claudia Vega, who gives a face to the charismatic Eva, muse and inspiration for the new Frankenstein in the endeavor to create a more human robot than humans. "Eva" is therefore a beautiful journey, part introspective and part entirely material, into the unexplored world of Spanish science fiction, an excellent example of how a beautiful story can be told without resorting to spectacular special effects and excessively convoluted plots, but simply leveraging emotions.