‘Eva Lasting’ Review: A Classic Coming of Age Story in the Heart of Colombia
Nostalgia has become a big storytelling component in the last couple of years. Stranger Things became such a huge hit that it is only natural for other shows to try to imitate that level of success. I strongly believe that nostalgia has very little to do with the success of Stranger Things. That show only proved that Netflix could produce high-quality entertainment when the right creatives were behind the project. What really made that show successful was the quality of the characters and the story. Eva Lasting is a show that is trying to do something similar this week.
The series is created by Dago Garcia and stars Francisca Estevez, Julian Cerati, Cecilia Navia, and Santiago Alarcon. The series tells the story of Camillo, a young man living in Colombia. Camillo is a high school student. However, his high school only accepted male students until recently, when the first female student arrived at the school. Her name is Eva, and she is the most amazing person Camillo has ever met. The series will explore his relationship with this new girl and how he approached the challenges of his first love.
Being in love is a universal feeling, so from the get-go, Eva Lasting manages to be a very relatable series. The memories of meeting that first person that makes you feel butterflies in your belly are a very powerful one. It is like this that the show is trying to manipulate its audience into watching a series that feels very well-intentioned. However, as the story progresses, it reveals to be a very shallow and boring first love story. Being in love might be universal, but the show’s depiction of it seems very much stuck in one place in the world and in a specific time frame.
It is clear that Dago Garcia and his writers are pulling from memories of their own past or at least trying to replicate the feeling of those memories. The result is quite inconsistent. Some of the situations that are presented on the show feel very much like things everyone in the world could relate to. Meanwhile, others feel like very specific situations, and it is very hard to relate to them. We all have limited empathy, and Eva Lasting uses it very quickly.
The main issue is the tone. The series is clearly being made with the intention of being comical, but some situations are definitely not, and yet, the series acts as if they are showing us the most comedic thing ever. It feels like these scenes, which exist throughout the entire season, are completely out of touch with what is happening on screen. There can be space for humor but also for drama, and some events are surely better to be approached with a series mindset. The series avoids doing this at every second, and it feels weird.
Nostalgia can carry you only so far. Let’s go back again to the success of Stranger Things, a show filled with countless references to many other pieces of art, but that manages to become its own thing by creating wonderful characters. Characters can all be comedic at one moment and very dramatic the next time. This sense of dynamism can really go a long way because that is exactly what life is. Not everything is serious, but not everything is a joke, either. In Eva Lasting, the tone is too consistent without bringing any dynamism, and things start feeling fake.
The illusion of reality is one of fiction’s most important things. It doesn’t matter if you deal with politics, war, aliens, or even magic. If the world’s rules feel consistent and the characters feel real enough in their context, then you can buy anything they throw at you because it would make sense within that world. Eva Lasting seems to exist in this level of hyperreality that is certainly not ours, but also not one onto itself. The characters cannot sell what they say or the world they live in.
The actors do their best with the material that has been provided to them. Estevez is undoubtedly the best performer in the show; her Eva is harsh, mysterious, and very sweet. Meanwhile, all the boys and adults seem to be playing their characters in the most boring way possible. Other than Camillo, because he is the main character, none of the other boys feel like real people at all but like ideas of one. They are described with very basic characteristics and then thrown away by the story.
In the end, Eva Lasting might work for the oldest crowd. Those people are the ones who will feel nostalgic for the period that the story is trying to represent. However, even that target audience might have a hard time when the characters and the situation are not really that compelling. Latin American audiences will feel much more attached to some of the events here, but this might not have been the best way to approach a story like this one. Everything feels so off; it is very strange.