Are people crazy? Does anyone consider the possibility of being free? Going wherever you want, wherever you like. We all have a destiny. I was born a thief. I don't believe in "this is yours, and this is mine".

With this monologue, Carlos, sixteen years old, enters a luxury house and begins his criminal journey.

He drinks, dances, steals.

Buenos Aires 1971.

At school, he has a violent encounter with his peer Ramon, the son of a convict and an unscrupulous mother; he starts hanging out with him and committing thefts and murders. With his angelic face, beautiful, blond, and unsuspecting, he continues his criminal path, with his rival and lover companion, insensitive to any crime committed. He kills with extreme coldness and superficiality, under the self-referential effect of a complacent charm as a manipulative liar.

Son of modest people, he received an honest and balanced upbringing, yet remained immune to the example lived in the family.

Until the death of his accomplice Ramon due to an accident where he was driving, he finds another accomplice with whom he will continue his criminal activities undisturbed, alternating thefts and murders with returns home to his parents to eat his favorite schnitzel.

The ferocity of his crimes will reach unprecedented levels until his arrest in 1972, in a crescendo of madness and violence, experienced in a historical moment of extreme corruption and grotesque socio-political situation.

“El angel,” the original title, tells the true story of the criminal Carlos Robledo Puch, born in Buenos Aires on January 19, 1952. Convicted of 11 murders, one attempted murder, 17 robberies, one rape, one attempted rape, one sexual abuse, two abductions of minors, and two thefts.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, he has been detained in prison since 1973; as of January 2019, having spent 45 years in prison, he has become the longest-serving prisoner in Argentina.

The film artistically tells the crazy story of this young killer who escapes any Lombrosian relationship between physical appearance and violent behavior.

His mother had longed for him so much that she turned to a priest, who believed that only God could give her what the world needed… irony of fate!

The boy claims to have received only good examples; the parents are good people, he was sent from heaven, and he describes himself as a spy for God.

Every criminal act he commits does not elicit any emotion but only the dimension of a banal routine act.

The ontological insensitivity that constitutes him highlights the futility of every act performed, devoid of any purpose, even if psychopathic.

No means can justify an end that doesn’t exist because every action of Carlitos is an end in itself: “The world belongs only to thieves and artists; the others work to live.”

A stylistically refined, aesthetically sophisticated film manages to artistically tell a criminal, raw, and evil story in an absolutely original way, with total elegance and without any unnecessary vulgarity.

A nod to Camus’ The Stranger, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, and Peter from Funny Games.

Luis Ortega, between Camus’ novel and the crimes narrated by Kubrick and Haneke, evokes the actions of those young people who exhaust themselves in gestures and the confusion of codes up to the limit where the code of life confuses with that of death.

The total disconnection between heart, mind, and behavior, in a suffocating emotional atrophy that feeds the virtue of the irresponsibility of one’s absolute insignificance.

Carlos never chooses anything; he is an empty act, a mechanical gesture: no pleasure derives from it, only simple, violent, murderous, useless reaction, without a real cause.

The story, the care of the images, the soundtrack, recall Trapero’s The Clan, the use of the body to Larrain’s Tony Manero, and with these, the eternal, metaphysical rather than physical, inexhaustible, and insoluble struggle between good and evil.

Any why would be exhausted in the question that is the only possible answer.

Evil is uncertain and undefined...

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice