'Eva' seduces Venice
Catalan director Kike Maíllo's sci-fi debut is the talk of the Lido
The first thing that crossed many people's minds after coming out of the first official screening of Eva at the Venice Film Festival was why the movie wasn't showing in competition. Considering the garbage that festival-goers had had to watch over the previous three days and the very low level of competition (except for some of the English-language films) it was incomprehensible that such an impeccable film as this had to be unveiled in no man's land. There was deserved applause for Kike Maíllo's first movie: though he might seem a debuting feature director, he's really a guy with a proven track record.
The Catalan trusts himself implicitly (something you can see from the first shot) and reveals himself to be an excellent director of actors and a man who has seen a ton of movies. It's true he's helped by a restrained script of the kind that Spanish cinema hasn't sniffed out in a while: full of nuance, with great characters and dialogue, carefully drawn but seemingly simple. It concerns a famous scientist (Daniel Brühl) who returns home after many years away to start designing the brain of a new model of robot. The problem is that there await his brother and his brother's wife (Alberto Ammann and Marta Etura, who starred together in Cell 211, a four-sided triangle which is completed by Eva (Clàudia Vega).
The final touch is its tackling of the science-fiction genre, always delicate, especially when it's about transforming bits of metal into talking souls that viewers suffer and feel for. Surprisingly, the motor of the film is not kept going by the special effects (which are functional and spectacular at the same time thanks to mouth-watering postproduction work), but rather the solid structure of an out-and-out drama: a love triangle brilliantly played out by three actors with as proven a track record as Ammann, Brühl and Etura.
The latter manages to create a woman with whom you fall in love instantly and utterly; Brühl drives the tale and acts as a powerful dramatic detonator with a first-class performance, while Ammann is the perfect complement who turns a simple phrase into a work of genius.
All very well, but talking about Eva also means talking about Clàudia Vega, a 12-year-old girl (10 when she made the film) with traces of the femme fatale about her and a frankly incredible ability to seduce the audience. Vega is a storm of self-confidence with astounding range and the look of someone twice her age.
And if that weren't enough there's also Lluís Homar in a wonderful role as a robot butler with factory-made empathy, which he pins down by keeping the facial gestures to a minimum and increasing the degree of his bodily expression.
Kike Maíllo's film is a delicate analysis of man's ins and outs, his - almost always - badly managed relationship with the universe of emotions, as well as a demonstration that a film can be everything it wants to be as long as somebody believes in it. Maíllo believes in Eva and you notice. In the background you can glimpse traces of Beautiful Girls (Eva teaches Álex to skate and her character has similarities with that of Natalie Portman in the film) and, inevitably, of Fargo , even if only due to the simple matters of meteorology and atmosphere.
In the end, however, it is a film unique in its kind, (truly) original and, above all, tremendously personal. Maíllo promised something different and that is what he has achieved.
DANIEL BRÜHL Actor: "I spent years wanting to work with the new Catalan directors"
There is no stopping Daniel Brühl. Since 2003, when he starred in Good Bye, Lenin! , he has been working to his heart's content and absorbing roles (and languages) at dizzying speed. On screen he has spoken in Spanish, Catalan, English, French and German and gives the impression that if one day he was offered a part in Japanese, he'd master it in a couple of weeks.
He sits down on a sofa a few meters from the Lido beach in Venice, where he is presenting the Spanish sci-fi film Eva at the annual film festival, and speaks with the steadiness of someone who has lots to say, but doesn't want to rush to say it. Cinephiles will recognize his face from such roles as the German sniper in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and his appearance in the second part of the Bourne trilogy. "This character is different from what I have done up to now, mainly because Eva is a genre film; so it throws my head into something that is completely unknown," says the actor, whose next project will see him play racing driver Niki Lauda in a biopic directed by Ron Howard. "I really wanted to do something like this and I spent time trying to sink my teeth into a dish like this. What's more, in Germany it's difficult to find this kind of project and I spent years wanting to work with all these young people coming out of ESCAC [the Cinema and Audiovisual School of Catalonia] who make great films. That's why when Kike's project reached me I didn't hesitate... Well, the truth is that I was a little but scared by all the robot stuff, but they were very clever and sent me a teaser. That convinced me to accept.
"The bluescreen stuff, the little green screen and the sensors were always uncomfortable for me. That thing of having to work without knowing exactly what your references are is not for me. There are actors who say this helps them improve? Not in my case. I remember that sometimes I was on set and I thought: "Fuck, is this going to work?" Luckily the postproduction crew has done an incredible job."
