Crime saga serves up empty, wanton killing
The Argentine film “El Angel” is very good at inducing a sense of queasiness as we behold the spectacle of a babyfaced, curly-haired, psychopathic killer at work. The movie is made with skill, but it’s so relentless in backing away from any psychologizing or moralizing — or just about anything else that might give us a handle on what makes this monster tick — that it finally feels like an empty horror show.
The film is a fictionalized account of the crimes of Carlos Robledo Puch, a young Buenos Aires resident who was arrested in 1972 and sentenced to prison, where he remains to this day, for a series of murders, rapes, robberies and other transgressions committed over two years. He became a kind of celebrity in Argentina, where his looks earned him the nickname of “the angel of death.”
The central character, called Carlitos (newcomer Lorenzo Ferro), is destined for bad things from the beginning, as indicated by the casual contempt with which he treats his decent if ineffectual parents, who are aware of his criminal tendencies but have no idea how far he will go. Carlitos is smirky, and deeply impressed with himself. During his narrative ruminations, he reveals a belief that he is above or beyond the rules, but in his case it seems almost like a random thought rather than an explanation.
Early on, after breaking into a house, he puts on a pop record and begins to dance around the room, almost as if performing for an invisible audience. Make of that what you will.
Carlitos quickly falls in with a schoolmate, Ramon (Chino Darin), whose father (Daniel Fanego) is a career criminal and addict and whose mother (Mercedes Moran) exudes a kind of open-ended and farfrom-wholesome sexuality. There’s also sexual attraction between Carlitos and Ramon, though the movie plays it pretty close to the vest.
The crime spree begins, and Carlitos quickly outdoes and outguns the other members of his new, unholy family, who look on with astonishment at his penchant for casual, even whimsical slaughter. Director Luis Ortega sometimes seems to be presenting Carlitos’ bloody actions as a sick joke, a challenge to the viewer along the lines of “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The acting is good, especially from Fanego and Moran, whose characters begin to feel like amateurs in the presence of a truly demented professional. Yet Ortega’s coyness about pinning down Carlitos makes us wonder whether the filmmaker has anything in mind besides offering the thrills of watching amoral brutality, what Alex, in “A Clockwork Orange,” called “the old ultraviolence.”
Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com