The House of the Angel (no 36)

 

by Allan Fish

(Argentina 1957 73m) not on DVD

Aka. La Casa del Angel

Sin is death for the soul and body

p  Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson  d  Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson  w  Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, Beatriz Guido, Martin Rodrigues Rodriguez Mentatti  novel  Beatriz Guido  ph  Anibal Gonzalez Paz  m  Juan Carlos Paz  art  Emilio Rodrigues Mentasti

Elsa Daniel (Anna Castro), Lautaro Murua (Pablo Aguirre), Guillermo Battaglia (Dr.Castro), Berta Ortegosa (Señora Castro), Yordana Fain (Naná), Bárbara Mujica (Vicenta), Lili Gacel (Julieta), Alejandro Rey (Julian),

At the turn of the sixties the star of Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson burned brightly both at home and abroad.  His films were compared to those of Orson Welles, particularly in their visual style, and helped bring his nation’s cinema to the attention of the whole, not just the Hispanic, world.  So what exactly went wrong?  Why is he so forgotten today?  Why is the Halliwell Guide the only annual to even include this or his other films within its pages?  One would think that he had gone seriously out of vogue, and one would be absolutely right.  But again I ask, why?

            It seems this is rather down to circumstances outside of his control.  But for a director once called, admittedly as valedictory following his early death at fifty three in 1978, “Argentina’s foremost director“, why is it that none of his great works are even on DVD in his homeland, let alone with English subtitles to allow us to savour of them?  Why are his films now so rarely glimpsed that every sighting would be a cause for rejoicing, were not so many critics unaware of his very existence?  It would be fair to say that his later films were more overtly political, and even occasionally sexual (especially Piedra Libre), both factors that hardly endeared him to the authorities in his homeland.  But his early works, filled with what Edgardo Cozaninsky called “a fondness for Gothic households and perverse children“, are delicate works indeed, almost as delicate as the female protagonist at the heart of the film that surely remains his masterpiece.

            What keeps the film so fascinating half a century on is not its plot, which is essentially slim – young girl of fourteen struggles to overcome her adolescent yearnings, then is haunted for life after being raped by a family friend – but the incredible treatment.  It’s right to note the similarity in the camera angles, deep focus photography and even the lighting to the films of Welles, while Ortegosa’s mater familias is so fiercely gorgonesque as to scare the average T-Rex.  The politician’s rant about liberalism in the parliament contrasts with the very opposite conditions in which young Anna and her sisters grow up, saturated, even drowning in Catholic guilt, dominated over by not just their family but in a house with every bit the character of a Manderley or an Amberson mansion.   There’s such a Dickensian, even Brontëesque feel about it, one almost expects to see Martita Hunt’s Miss Havisham or Henry Daniell’s Brocklehurst on the staircase.

            Even so, great visual symbolism is one thing, but it’s other factors that make the film so remarkable.  Who can forget the emotion of the cinema trip to see Valentino in The Eagle, or the heroine getting into her bath in a bath gown, as doing so naked was unseemly?  It was Torre-Nilsson’s first collaboration with Guido, the author who later became his wife, and their script plays up the symbolic without entirely eschewing the melodramatic.  All the cast respond superbly, but particular garlands must be laid at the feet of Elsa Daniel.  Her deliberately striking cropped blonde locks contrasting well with the traditional raven-haired beauties of Latino legend, her despondency in the closing sequence echoed by her haunted narration.  Not only one of the great female performances of its decade, but the start of her period as muse to Torre-Nilsson, a partnership comparable to that of Buñuel and Silvia Pinal, to whose Viridiana the film can stand comparison in more ways than one.  Welcome to a world where punishment is not justice but a religion and where girls like Daniel live and die in the angel’s shadow.  A shadow she may have lost, but in a film that, thankfully, remains ripe for reassessment.