The House of the Angel

La casa del ángel

(Argentina, 1957, 75 mins, 35mm)

Producer: Leopoldo Torre Nilsson
Screenwriters: Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Beatriz Guido, Martin Rodríguez Mentasti
Cinematographer: Aníbal Gonzalez Paz
Editor: Jorge Garate
Cast: Elsa Daniel, Lautaro Murúa, Guillermo Battaglia, Bárbara Mujica, Berta Ortegosa

Shown at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, this is the movie that made Leopoldo Torre Nilsson an international art house star. Based on a novel by his wife and usual screenwriter, Beatriz Guido, The House of the Angel focuses on the ruling class in 1920s Argentina, a deeply repressive society where political arguments were often settled in a duel and young women—such as the cloistered teenaged Ana, played by Elsa Daniel—were expected to be totally ignorant of sex.

With dark expressionistic camera angles that have been compared to Orson Welles' and dissonant blasts of music, Torre Nilsson unfolds the story of young Ana, suffocating under her mother’s fanatically enforced purity. Her fall from grace comes at the hands of a dashing politician—a friend of her father’s—who visits the family’s imposing home in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. (Architecture plays a crucial role in the director’s films.) Appropriately, when it was first released in the U.S., this striking story of political hypocrisy, sexual discovery, and Catholic guilt was re-titled End of Innocence.

David Ansen

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