loving a cobra
by
Douglas Messerli
Luis
Ortega (screenwriter and director) El ángel (El Angel) / 2018
When
I shared the fact that I’d just watched Luis Ortega’s film with a knowledgeable
film friend, who hadn’t yet seen the movie, he asked me what I thought about
it. The first word that came to my mind was “charming,” but I immediately
backed away from that word, feeling almost perverse for having even momentarily
mentally assigning it to a work about a young 17-year old man who quickly grew
into what Los Angeles Times reviewer Katie Walsh describes: “He simply
is who he is — Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch, a teenage psychopath who terrorized
Argentina in the early ’70s with a crime spree of rape, robbery and murder.
Newspapers dubbed him “The Angel of Death” and the “The Black Angel” due to the
juxtaposition of his cherubic appearance and his remorseless criminal behavior.”
I know nothing about the original figure on whom this fictional version is based except what I’ve read in connection with Ortega’s movie. But if the real Carlos Robledo Puch and his early partner, Ramón Perelta were anything like actors Lorenzo Ferro and Chino Darín, I can well understand why to some Argentinians, despite his many murders which included even an infant, the two stood out as a kind of ruthless Bonnie and Clyde—except given Puch’s homosexual inclinations and Darín’s own toying with bisexuality we’d have to describe them more as they do themselves in one scene as they begin to rob a high end jewelry shop: as Ramón quickly scoops up the rings, bracelets, necklaces and other pieces into a bag, Carlos takes his time to enjoy perusing what he’s never before seen but, nonetheless, feels almost entitled to. He puts on a pair of pearl earrings, pushing back his golden ringlets and staring at himself in the mirror of the glass display window. Wondering what he’s up to, Ramón moves over to him, observing that he looks like Marilyn Monroe. But seeing himself next to the ravishingly beautiful kid changes Ramón’s mind to describe the two of them as “Che and Fidel.” “Evita and Peron” responds Carlitos, clearly mystifying his buddy in crime. Carlos almost scolds him for his greedy grab of jewels: “Hey, we’re alive, why can’t you enjoy it?”
It is moments like these which occur at a
regular pace for at least the first half of this film that make you stand back
and stop judging what it is they are doing, ridiculously falling into collusion
with them and recognizing their beauty, as perverted as it is in the context of
their actions. There is a definite disconnect between their faces and the
criminal minds behind them, and that gap is what makes us gasp with enchantment
and leads me to want to call the film charming. I am charmed by them the way an
Indian snake-charmer is by a cobra.
And Ferro, in particular, both as his
character and his role as actor knows it, looking at almost all times over his
should to make sure you’re still there, watching his very slightly teenage
pudgy body weave it erotic trance. To say that Carlos is narcissistic is to
call the mythical Narcissus a brute. No, he was a true beauty in love with the
beauty of being himself.
In the very first scene of this film,
Carlos, who’s already determined to leave school in order to become a thief—one
of “gods spies,” as he sees it—is simply walking down a street when he
unexpectedly stops in his tracks and jumps a fence on the other side of which
stands of an architect’s dream of a Buenos Airies property. Walsh nicely
captures the intruders’ actions and behavior:
“He
enters through an open sliding door, helps himself to a drink, fingers the
jewelry and wanders around with a kind of entitled insouciance. He puts on a
record and begins to dance wildly, his curls bouncing in time with the staccato
beat. He leaves on a motorcycle with a few LPs stashed on the back, arriving
home where he greets his mother (Cecilia Roth), who’s cooking his favorite
meal.”
Carlitos’ parents, good and decent hard-working
people, are disturbed by his showing up a home with an expensive motorcycle,
even though he explains to them that a friend loaned it to him. With no money
whatsoever, he has evidently brought home other treasures previously that
people have “given him,” and his father, in particular warns him of his
behavior. He is now, incidentally, attending a kind of vocational school that
sounds suspiciously like a kind of reform institution. But then how can such
good-hearted, church-going folk not still love their cupidinous son. Besides, he
is so very sure of himself that any real action on their parts would surely
have little effect. Moreover, he gives almost everything he steals away as
presents. The necklace he has stolen is awarded to his erstwhile girlfriend, a
twin who’s mad at him for not having heard from him in several weeks—the period
evidently when Carlitos has been whisked away from high school and shuffled off
to the vocational institution where he meets the far more conventionally
handsome Ramón, the scion to a truly criminal family, who after properly
slugging out the pretty angel for daring to put a blowtorch near his hair just
to get his attention. He later gives one of the stolen records to Ramón.
Soon after, when he actually gets to know
the endlessly flirtatious Carlitos, Ramón takes him home to meet his mafia-like
father José (Daniel Fanego), who sits around the rec room in a short jacket and
his underpants with his balls hanging out—a fact which highly attracts the
young newcomer—and a mother (Mercedes Morán) who after getting a glimpse of her
son’s new friend, begins immediately to plot how to get him into bed.
After hearing the young thief talk for only
a few moments, he hands him a gun and, with erotic purring’s in his ear, shows
him how to shoot it, Ramón adding to fun by telling him to “relax your anus.”
The shot leads Mrs. Peralta to remind her husband he’s not permitted to shoot
weapons in the house, while for Carlos the rush he receives from the act makes
him want more. José argues, however, that ammunition is expensive, and before
anyone even has a moment to think, Carlos is convincing them to that he knows
of the perfect place where they can get some ammo.
In the very next frame of the film, Carlos
is climbing to the roof of an Armería while Ramón waits for him to open the
steel shutters and his father in the car. Once inside Carlos grabs up entire
stacks of rifles, piles of pistols, and various other makes of guns, throws
them into a canvas bag and crawls out of the partially raised shutter before
getting back in the car, only to be told that he’s forgotten the ammo.
He tells them to drive around the block
while he goes back to get the forgotten bullets. But once back inside, he also
picks up two more pistols which for most of the rest of the film he will tuck
into the front of his jeans, causing trouble for everyone and, most of all, for
himself. “Look Carlitos,” José calmly comments as the family and their new
found son sit around a table upon which the weapons now rest, “what you did
today was great, but don’t ever do it again. It wasn’t what we had planned.”
Carlos, almost just as calmly, justifiably replies: “We had no plan.”
They recognize that the unflappable Carlos
will surely put them in jeopardy, and José doesn’t want to risk going back to
jail. Yet they also perceive the kid as a genius and dare to “train him right.”
And they do trust him enough now to bring him into their little “band,”
offering him a new fake passport which names him “Carlos Brown,” Charlie Brown
to us gringos.
But inevitably things get stranger since
Carlos is basically a man without fear or a conscience, a spoiled genius whose
constantly shifting lying, pretty, pouting, and pursing, lipstick red lips help
him get away with murder. Writing in Film Comment Jonathan Romney, in
one of the very best of the essays on this film, pretty much sums up the tone
of the rest of this mesmerizing movie:
“The
crime is fun at first, given a groovy caper-movie spin: Ortega loves setting a
robbery to an arch music-box waltz as Carlitos eyes the spoils, or speeding one
up, with snappy jump cuts, to the sound of ’70s blues boogie (the contemporary
soundtrack, presumably of 100-percent Latin American provenance, and including
a Spanish-language “House of the Rising Sun,” is one of the film’s more
distinctive assets). But things get weird, and menacing, fairly quickly. Found
with a gun in his bed, Carlitos points it at his shocked mother, then asks, “Do
you think I’d point a real gun at you?”—and we think that yes, he would, and
very likely fire it too. An early robbery has the disconcerting feel of a
dream, with Carlitos a baffled observer of what’s happening, as he shoots the
elderly owner of a huge, atmospheric house, then follows him as he wanders
around, refusing to acknowledge he’s been hit.”
At another point, after entering a
nightclub where previously Ramón has gotten into a fight after being called a
“faggot” for hooking up with a gay gallerist for a blow job in return for the
art world ditching of his family’s ill-gotten art, Carlos enters a room where
two men are asleep each upon his own mattress. Pulling out both of his pistols
he simultaneously shoots them dead. But instead of running after committing
such an atrocity, he remains in place, unable to believe that they are truly
dead, that they’re not just faking it.
Even in the 1970s young boys and perhaps
whole societies had become so immured to the games of death through television,
movies, and gaming machines that even without the hundreds of murderous
computer play stations people like Carlitos found it hard to believe that
killing was anything more than an imaginative act. Which is why, most
certainly, even I who have never played such games can still describe the
flickers of light that portray murder after murder as something that seems
charming. Even Bonnie and Clyde, if they could awaken from the dead to watch a
movie such as this one might be shocked at what they were observing.
By this time, despite Ramón’s pretense of
being straight, we can imagine that the two flirtatious boys have shared at
least some time under the covers. But when Charlie Brown’s comrade actually
begins to regularly put out for the art dealer and his friends in exchange for
what the suddenly strangely naive Ramón believes might lead to a career in the
movies, he goes too far.
At this point Carlos is desperately in
love with Ramón even if they haven’t yet actually consummated it in sex. After
the jewelry store robbery mentioned above, when his friend falls to sleep in
their shared hotel room, Carlitos strews the dozens of jewels they’ve stolen
upon Ramón’s naked crotch, awarding him their glorious haul just as he has
treated his girlfriend to the gold trinket and later brings home a backpack
filled with money to his parents as a gift in return for love. Romney asks the
million-dollar question: “Are they lovers at this point? The film hedges its
bets,” but he argues that the double blood-letting I describe at the back of
the bar as being “either jealous fury or a displacement activity to compensate
for his beloved not putting out—to him, at least.”
Late at night, Carlos’ father buries the
blood money his son as brought home in the back yard. In punishment for the
murder of a truck driver in a botched robbery attempt, Carlos is later made by
José and Ramon to take the body of a truck driver and crash it into a tree in
the middle of an empty field before dousing it with gas and lighting it to
suggest the man has died in a mysterious crash.
Carlos’ attempts to buy love fail so miserably that he ultimately seems
to have no other choice but to drive the car in which he and Ramón are riding
into another automobile, killing his now traitorous love while making it look
like an accident.
Charlie Brown’s own mother, after meeting
up with Ramón’s mother calls the police on her son.
Even after escaping from jail, Carlos
attempts to reach out to his family as he wanders around Ramón and his family’s
now empty house, telephoning his mother like a lost child as she, surrounded by
an entire armed squadron of policemen, attempts to coax him to reveal where he
is calling from. Moments later the seemingly beautiful lost and guileless man-child—whom
we now
know
as a monstrous murderer—dancing alone in the old Peralta manse has been
surrounded by what looks like an entire army to bring him back to justice, dead
or alive. Finally, the angel has forgotten to look over his shoulder to see if
anyone might be watching his derring-do acts.
Ortega’s film is a bit like a cleaned-up
fairytale version of another horrific murder tale, In Cold Blood wherein
a homosexually-inclined Perry Smith, psychologically egged-on by the
heterosexual male he loved, “Dick” Hickock, killed an entire family into whose
home they had broken simply to rob them of their money. But the limping short hunk
and grizzly-faced lean ex-con of Richard Brooks’ film have been replaced in El
Angel by a handsome stud and a cute moppet of a kid whose curly hair just
calls out to be ruffled. We are tricked into loving them just by their
Hollywood-like looks, so enchanted that we can only describe the story of the
trail of blood they leave behind as being charming.
In the end, I didn’t tell my curious
friend that the film was “charming,” but described it as “beautifully horrific,”
almost the way you might react to a Spanish Giallo film by Dario Argento or
Mario Bava, but without all their blood.
Los
Angeles, November 18, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).
