These are the Reasons for the Success of “Eva Lasting”, the New Netflix

On February 15, Netflix premiered "Eva Lasting", a series created by Dago García and co-directed with Mateo Spielberg. Production has become one of the main trends of the platform in Colombia.

“Eva Lasting” follows the story of Eva (Francisca Estévez), the first woman to enter a boys' school in Bogotá in the 1970s. Although the plot focuses on the romance of Eva and Camilo (Emmanuel Restrepo), it also exposes endless explorations and firsts that range from the sexual to the academic. She brings with her a mystery that traps Camilo and his group of friends.

Why is it succeeding?

"Everything in the past was better" is surely a phrase that we have heard from our ancestors at some point. The paradoxical thing is that, thanks to the series and books, it can be verified that it is not necessarily reality. The fact that “Eva Lasting” succeeds is due to the appeal of nostalgia.

This series is a vivid representation of numerous stories that we were told about urban contexts in the last century. The series appeals to the memory with old automobiles or the historical facts of politics and sports. There are very careful details in the art direction and in the soundtrack that makes it more endearing.

The production also resorts to social denunciation of gender roles, which is still very popular now, four decades later. There remains the feeling that everything is like what the over-referenced in the series, Gabriel García Márquez, applied well in his work, with circular time. Everything seems to change, but essentially, no.

The chapters of "The First Time" try to encapsulate various issues in a fluid way. The most notable are toxic masculinity, sexuality, gender and domestic violence, classism, mental health and even freedom of the press. Each problem has the beginning and axis in the character of Eva.

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Literature as thread

One of the most careful issues in the series, in addition to the phenomenon of iron music on the soundtrack, are the literary references. This gives us an example of the wide gap that existed and still exists between the district education system and the private one in Bogotá. Eva, who came from a private school, has an arsenal of appropriate phrases for each situation that are taken from a classic of literature.

The other students of the district school do not have the slightest idea of these works and from that innocence, the reader can take deep reflections with apparently superficial situations and characters. Each literary reference is represented as theatrical acts, which also portrays the rise of this art in the 60s and 70s in the city.

Over time, the theaters that presented films and plays were monopolized by the 'boom' of pornography in Bogotá. For this reason, the title of the series is suggestive in various areas, not only because of the first time of a woman in a male school, but also because the stage represented by the protagonists was the first time in love and sex.

Sexuality

In this exploration, Eva is the first window of modernity in their lives, their true teacher. Thanks to Eva, they close that cycle of sexual awakening and exchange it for cinema and literature.

In such a rigid and prudish age, sex was somewhat taboo, but patriarchy was the law. Contradictions can be seen in that Camilo's father has no problem taking his son to a brothel, but he does have a problem with the fact that his wife has had seven boyfriends before him; or that the parents' board decides to fire a teacher because she had a relationship with a parent, among other situations.

The series works because it feeds the memory and nostalgia of generation X, verifies the stories that millennials heard and serves as a point of comparison of a before and after to those of generation Z. All of this lends itself to the series It is consumed as a family and has potential for the future.