El Angel

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

EL ANGEL   ***

Luis Ortega

2018

IDEA:  An account of 19-year-old Argentine murderer and thief Carlos Puch, who was dubbed "The Angel" due to his cherubic looks.

BLURB:  When confronted with evil, it is our instinct to rationalize it, to attempt to ascribe to the perpetrator some motivation that will explain away unconscionable actions. Film and other media have long represented real-life criminals with this aim, mixing factual details with speculation to draw conclusions about what made them tick. In El Angel, notorious Argentine serial killer and thief Carlos Puch compellingly defies such diagnostics – as played by Lorenzo Ferro, the baby-faced murderer is a self-mythologizing enigma who simply believes himself to be above law and morality. Without pointing to anything concrete or contriving answers, Ortega situates Puch’s fluid sexual identity and vaguely anti-capitalist sentiments within a 1970s Argentina that provides intriguing context for his behavior. The pointedly marginalized presence of the darker-skinned underclass, for instance, adumbrates the racial and economic inequity from which he’s been notably cocooned, while the escalating police visibility indexes the hegemony of the country’s military junta. Meanwhile, pervasive homophobia encircles Puch and his lover/accomplice, suggesting the degree to which societal intolerance has forced him to repress his sexuality. He even implicitly aligns himself with old pseudoscience equating homosexuality with an essential deviance, declaring himself a “born thief,” and thus an other who’s predisposed to flouting the rules. But his ideology is incoherent, and Ortega’s portrait remains necessarily elusive. It combines a romanticized pop-aesthetic vision of violent rogueness with a countervailing sense of the bleak social reality Puch blocks out, creating a dissonance that resists resolution. El Angel, slick and digestible though it is, leaves us with a terrifying inexplicability: a kid with no sense of proportion or consequence, divorced from the weight of the world, stranded from logic.