‘El Ángel’ Is Devilishly Tantalizing, But That’s All

Like its handsome but zombie-like protagonist, “El Ángel” is dressed up in beautiful cinematographic frills but lacks an emotional core. Directed by the up-and-coming Luis Ortega and produced by the illustrious Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, “El Ángel” is Argentina’s official submission to the 2019 Academy Awards and is based on the criminal career of the country’s longest-serving prisoner and most notorious serial killer, Carlos Robledo Puch. The film amounts to a desensitizing concatenation of point-blank shootings — a surprising disappointment, given Almodóvar’s ability to evoke both voyeuristic anticipation and overwhelming emotion with the violent scenes in his own films, like “Volver” and “The Skin I Live In.” Only towards the end does Ortega place the unsettlingly impassive Carlos (Lorenzo Ferro) in the larger world when he emerges from a police car to a crowd of gawking onlookers who are beside themselves with fear and admiration. The real-life media harped on the incongruity between Puch’s criminal proclivities and his good looks, hence his nickname, “The Angel of Death.” One newspaper headline mentions Carlos’s “dubious sexuality,” evincing the public’s fascination with his personal entanglements over the details of his heinous crimes (11 murders, innumerable armed robberies, and the rape of several women). More interesting than the vacant incarnation of Puch in this film is the national project that built his mythic clout and celebrity through the biased media attention that Ortega only spotlights at the end. “El Ángel” is ultimately a bland rehashing of the bare-bones, empirical events of Puch’s career, as Ortega, in favor of obsessive aestheticization, papers over details that demand creative dramatization.

Set in 1970s Buenos Aires, the film begins with a chillingly sober voiceover by a teenage Carlos as he rummages through drawers in a stranger’s sumptuous bedroom. He doesn’t stop once he pockets everything he needs, but puts a record on and dances, swiveling on his feet with the impudent, unhurried confidence that becomes his trademark. He declares, “We all have a destiny. I was born a thief.” He forges a partnership with the object of his quiet infatuation, the surly Ramón (Chino Darín), and they enlist the help of Ramón’s father, who has his own criminal past. Together, they rob an armory, a jeweler, and an elderly man’s mansion in the countryside. Along the way, Carlos senselessly kills a series of unwitting victims and later, his own accomplices.

Ortega’s overeager showmanship allows him to create effectively pressurized moments of sexual tension, as he trains the camera on curious, cockeyed gazes for a moment too long, on lips upturned in suggestive smirks, and on Carlos’s bobbing neck as he swigs water. Carlos thrills visibly when Ramón’s father places his hands on his hips and shows him how to shoot a handgun. In some eerily beautiful scenes, Ortega recalls Almodóvar with his meticulous attention to color and lighting, and his geometric exactitude. Carlos unravels Ramón’s towel while he’s asleep, and places the jewels they’ve stolen on his crotch, as the camera pans out to luxuriate in patterns of saturated blues and oranges on furniture and on the walls, so that the room suddenly resembles an aquarium, and the gems an underwater treasure.

Despite occasionally successful aesthetic flourishes, Ortega traffics in weirdness in a way that is more alienating than intriguing and that doesn’t even serve an ostensible narrative purpose. People are as strangely impassive as Carlos is and engage in stilted conversations. Even Carlos’s well-meaning parents resemble the subjects of melancholic Renaissance portraiture. Then, there is the surreal moment when Carlos shoots the elderly proprietor of a countryside mansion, and the doddering man staggers up to the landing to stare fixedly at an abstract painting of naked bodies and ghoulish faces limned in lurid ink. He then sits on the toilet to urinate, still bleeding from his wound, without having spoken a word. It’s difficult not to suspect at this point that one has stumbled upon an ecosystem of drugged lab rats.

Ortega also neglects to approach Carlos’s disturbed interiority from a discernible angle beyond his swaggering, devil-may-care attitude. The unwritten class tensions in this world suggest that their criminal behavior might serve as a refusal to let society put them in a middling place, as Ramón says, “The world belongs to outlaws and artists… Everybody else has to work for a living.” But such underlying concerns are only hinted at, as Ortega’s perspective remains decidedly omniscient, uncritical, and hands-off despite the rich history he has at his disposal. He could have meditated on the role of the media in an era where biases based on physiognomy commanded destructive authority. Toward the end of the film, a clinical assessment of Carlos intimates the miasmic homophobia of the 1980s: “This is an odd specimen who’s broken the Lombrosian theories that tie natural born criminals with physical ugliness… It’s uncertain if his alleged sexual deviation influenced his acts.” Some were actually disabused of the notion that Puch was wholly responsible for his actions, exemplifying the irrational human weakness for physical beauty: “Society blames the parents of the monster for not putting limits or keeping him in check.”

But enough projecting what could have been. Ortega uses highly stylized cinematography and dialogue to affect the same enigmatic allure as the protagonist, but never arrives at an artfully elliptical purpose. Ultimately, nothing happens that couldn’t be gleaned from Puch’s Wikipedia page. Everything is enchanting to look at, shiny to touch, but none of that matters much given how diligently Ortega masquerades this unjustly insipid story.

—Staff writer Claire N. Park can be reached at claire.park@thecrimson.com.