Antonio Banderas is surprisingly good as Che, the foil for Evita in this movie musical about the life of Juan Peron's first wife. (The reader must be made aware that Evita and Che Guevara - the full name of Banderas' character - probably never did meet in real life.)
We were also struck by the reintroduction of music present on the original concept album but edited out of the Broadway musical. One song in particular, a rock-oriented number,was originally intended (in the concept album) to point up Che's involvement in selling insecticide. At the point it is used in the concept album, Che becomes disillusioned when he is unable to sell the insecticide to government officials; however, it is revamped in the movie to allow the audience to see how the spin doctors really work in the Argentina of Evita's day.
The way in which the songs were arranged often made more logical sense in the film version than in the Broadway version. Perhaps the best example of this occurred with the use of the song "Another Suitcase in Another Hall." In the concept album and Broadway stage version of EVITA, the young female character who sings this song is actually the woman ousted from the Peron bed by Evita herself, and is meant to convey her youth and inexperience at handling the ups and downs of romance. (I am led to believe that Juan Peron had a tendency to have affairs with women who were much younger than was he.) In the movie version, however, it is used by Evita at the beginning of the film. She had just learned that the man with whom she had tried to have an affair - in an attempt to sleep her way to the top and fight her way out of her family circumstances in the only way she and her family both knew how - was married and therefore unable to devote himself to her in more than just the obvious physical way. At this point in the movie, she herself is an inexperienced teen (a fact recognized by the Argentinian singer with whom she had just had an affair) with little more than a dream in her mind and a few pennies in her pocket. Therefore, it makes just as much sense for her to sing about "another suitcase in another hall" as it does for Peron's paramour to sing the same thing on Broadway.
Non-Catholics may not be aware that the prayer called the Salve Regina ("Hail Holy Queen") is used in everything from the concept album all the way through to this film. Lloyd Webber uses this prayer to make sure the viewer knows that many Argentinians did indeed confuse Evita and the Blessed Mother in the privacy of their minds. Many Catholics outside the environment of 1950's Argentina - including those who probably will be watching this movie - might find the use of this prayer blasphemous, but I understood full well what Lloyd Webber was attempting to do and thought he succeeded at it. (Look for the references during Evita's funeral sequence at the beginning, immediately afterwards, and toward the end of the movie when Evita is dying of uterine cancer.)
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