EVA

EVA. Kike [sic] MaÍllo, dir. Sergi Belbel et al., script.[1] Daniel Brühl, Marta Etura, Alberto Ammann, featured players. Spain/France: Escándalo Films et al. (prod.) / Paramount (Spanish dist.), 2011. See IMDb for complexities of production and distribution.[2] In Spanish (subtitled).

From the Storyline by Chockys on IMDb: "Set in 2041," more or less, EVA centrers on Alex Garel, "a well-known robot programmer who after 10 years returns to his" very wintry "home town to work in his old university when his friend Julia brings him a project to create a new line of robot child. There Alex" reunites with "his brother David, Lana (Alex's former lover and David's current wife), and Eva, Alex's 10-years-old niece. Looking for inspiration, Alex asks help Eva to be the muse of the new robot, watching her attitude and behavior during the time they spend together, making emotional tests to configure its personality. The relationship with his niece gives Alex doubts about finishing the project and awakens old feelings for Lana, at the same time he starts suspecting that perhaps the lovely and imaginative Eva is hiding an important secret about Lana and herself."[3] The secret is that Eva is already a robot, the child, so to speak of Alex and Lana, and, clearly, able to pass for human and think of herself as human (cf. Rachel in R. Scott's BLADE RUNNER.) Note EVA for its imaging of robotic animals, primarily an autonomous, fairly-high-level AI cat (where the Foley sounds are also important: the robot is very cat-like in its vocalizations as well as its movements). The imaging of the «souls», so to speak, of the robots is of great interest; intelligence, emotions, and a wide range of aspects of human personality are imaged in a merger of virtual art-glass and virtual mechanism: think of an "exploded" image of the works of a clock, in amber-glass, three dimensions, and in motion, manipulated by Alex as Tom Cruise's Chief John Anderton character manipulates computer icons in MINORITY REPORT. Issues of childhood and gender are foregrounded in EVA, and it is instructive that the unsucessful humanoid-child robot Alex builds is gendered male and looks somewhat simian.

For the name "Eva," cf. EX MACHINA (2015).

RDE, 14/III/15