I just saw ¡Ay Juancito!. A friend highly recommended it and I found it at a Blockbuster store here in Buenos Aires. Excellent! The pacing of the movie is very smooth, the actors are good, Adrián Navarro as Juan Duarte -the 'Hero' of the movie- Laura Novoa as Evita Perón, Leticia Brédice as Yvonne Pascal (Not the name of the real actress in this true story) and all the others in the cast. An amazing achievement of the casting was that of Alejandra Majluf as Niní Marshall, since she looks almost exactly like her! The recreation of the period -about 1950- was very good, even the colors looked like those of the old Technicolor.
The wardrobe was designed by Horace Lane, who actually designed clothes for Evita, so the accuracy of the women dresses is flawless. So were the make up and hair styles. The interiors were recreated quite lavishly and accurately. And we must consider that a great deal of ingenuity must have been used, since Argentinian movies are made with budgets that will only cover few minutes of shooting an American movie!
There are a couple of scenes that are intensely moving, one is when Evita is forced to renounce to the vice presidency of the country due to her gender (The excuse given to the people at the time was another) and to the threat that she represented to the military, the church and the oligarchy of the country.
The other scene is (I don't consider the following *A SPOILER* since this movie is not fiction and everybody knows contemporary history) the one of her death. Wow! with a minimum fuss this actress accomplished a very delicate and subtle ending of a very painful agony. The more I think about this movie, the more impressed I am with it. I'll check Héctor Olivera's work (The Director) to see the rest of his production.
