CINEMA: MADONNA AND EVA PERON: YOU MUST LOVE HER

She stands on the balcony of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, the night humid with portent, the masses chanting her name, as she sings her calculated confession. “And as for fortune, and as for fame,/ I never invited them in,/ Though they seemed to the world they were all I desired.”

Well, maybe they were what two famous women desired. Maria Eva Ibarguren Duarte de Peron kept her eye on the spotlight, her hand tightening around the cojones of power. And Madonna fought like hell for the right to incarnate, in one of the era’s most vivid musical dramas, a woman whose career and notoriety mirror her own: model for steamy photos, singer on the radio, movie actress of disputed pedigree, sexual adventurer. In both these stars one can see the great goad of ambition, the ability to enthrall and outrage. So there’s tabloid poetry in the fact that–50 years after Juan Peron’s election as President of Argentina, 20 years after the release of the original album of the musical, and after numerous false starts of film projects that had nearly every female but Queen Latifah rumored for the lead–Madonna should step out on the balcony in Evita.

It’s a relief to say that Alan Parker’s film, which opens on Christmas Day, is a pretty damn fine one, well cast and handsomely visualized–easily the best adaptation of a Broadway-style musical in decades. It is faithful to the sting and breadth of Tim Rice’s libretto, to the ravishing Andrew Lloyd Webber score that synthesizes Broadway, opera and pop with the lilt of Latino lounge music. But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions. For at the heart of the drama is Rice’s fascinated ambivalence toward the prototype couple of criminal celebrity and toward the culture that needs them to play out fantasies of success, overreaching greed, the instructive death at an early age.

Evita is not so much about Argentine politics as about the English obsession with class. Eva, the illegitimate daughter of an estate manager whose funeral her servant mother was forbidden to attend, gets back at the middle class with her upwardly nubile conquest of the military aristocracy. Our guide in this revenge melodrama is a sardonic, Rice-like narrator (Antonio Banderas), offering keys to the allure of Santa Evita, first lady, holy whore.

As a teenager in 1936 Eva makes her first conquest, the troubadour Agustin Magaldi (Jimmy Nail), whom she accompanies to Buenos Aires, a glittering Hollywood of hope for Eva. Her gift for attracting men of position leads her to Juan Peron (Jonathan Pryce), a junta colonel who becomes Argentina’s President in 1946. Eva’s glamour–less a natural attribute than a triumph of her will–and her urge to help the poor humanize Peron’s stolid majesty; they also come close to bankrupting the country, even as they drain her. She fulfills the rock-age hagiography: live big, die young, and leave a memory that time can transform into gaudy myth.

Parker has filmed the story in the suave, dark tones of a film-noir musical. Buenos Aires becomes a character in the movie less by re-creating period exteriors than by focusing on the extras’ faces–gorgeous, pensive reflections of Eva’s sultry magnetism. But this is, essentially, a three-character play, demanding that the stars must sing, swagger and act with style. Pryce, consummate pro, lives fully in all three realms. Banderas parades his sex appeal as the one man who is not a father figure to Evita; he is the skeptical stud who can match her arrogance with his own.

Madonna once again confounds our expectations–and, at times, exasperations. At first a star more famous for attitude than for voice, she proved, in the 1990 Dick Tracy, equal to the sere demands of Stephen Sondheim’s songs. Here again she does a tough score proud. Lacking the vocal vigor of Elaine Paige’s West End Evita, Madonna plays Evita with a poignant weariness, as if death has shrouded her from infancy. And dressed in sumptuous gowns or feeling life seep away, she has more than just a little bit of star quality. Just before Eva’s death, she sings the film’s one new tune, which sounds eerily like an act of faith: You Must Love Me. But love or hate Madonna-Eva, she is a magnet for all eyes. You must watch her. And to find the soul of the modern musical for once on the big screen, you must see Evita.