No wings, like smoke. The scorching sun, palm trees and cypresses, a cold house, an angel-like girl with a lively, sad face in gloomy shapeless clothes... This is not Lolita, liberated and greedy for experience, nor Turgenev’s Asya, trusting and open to love. Ana is the youngest daughter of a wealthy Argentine industrialist. Her innocence and insophistication, bordering on stupidity, do not make her attractive to men and cause ridicule of her sisters. In the world of naked garden sculptures, forever hidden their charms under sheets so as not to remind the casual witness of their nakedness about the existence of flesh, behind the blank walls that shield her from life, which invariably breaks into the light of God somewhere there, she spends her days in strange thoughtlessness and ignorance, left to herself.
Ana, previously as if undead at all, with the first minutes of the film, seems to wake up from the coma in which she was born. Raised in strict Catholic traditions, in fact, she does not even know the main postulate of her faith about the trinity of God, and prays to Jesus because He is young and handsome, and “God is a formidable and old bearded man”, does not arouse her sympathy.
Ana has never admired herself in the mirror, nor remained completely naked even in the bathroom, where she washed under supervision in a tight shirt; but the sight of a naked body on magazine clippings does not bother her at all, as if she were a primordial person in a garden of paradise, who does not know that nakedness should be ashamed. Elsa Daniel, with the face of an unearthly, pure angel, plays a damningly convincing innocence and charm, absolutely devoid of sexuality.
The world of Ana could be depicted beckoningly prosperous, sun-drenched, with a cool shade of trees; tease the viewer with the luxury of a two-storey mansion, a delightful feast of interiors, the shine of dishes. And it was possible to use life as a conditional decoration in the background. But the director and the cameraman are expressionistically whipping up the amosphere, saturating the streets, houses, trees with emotions, giving an alarming and threatening character to everything in sight, using unexpected camera angles, playing with lighting in contrast to light and shadow, expressively applying a close-up, making it clear that in this shaky world there is neither happiness nor joy, there is only eternal dissatisfaction, confusion and hopelessness.
There is nothing real in Ana’s life – everything is ambiguous, everything is false, everything is impossible – and there is no future; people put obstacles and traps before her, which she, pure and infinitely tender, cannot overcome. Ana’s mother daily teaches her daughters that complete renunciation of the flesh is the natural and only true way of existence; in her strictness she no longer sets herself any goals, it is a prohibition in the prohibition, reduced to absurdity. Trusting Ana takes everything on faith, not yet having time to know life. As a result, the conviction in the impermissibility of carnal motives leads the heroine, who is not even 18, to a powerful spiritual crisis, generated by the dissonance between the first, inevitable and bright, youthful instincts open in herself and the strict attitude about the sinfulness and impermissibility of such.
Charismatic MP Pablo Aguirre is Ana's first and probably only love. There is something in common between them: both are misunderstood by their environment, both strive to break out of the vicious circle in which, methodically, from generation to generation, children repeat the fate of their parents, inheriting long-dead values, norms, taboos. Pablo’s rebellion is conscious, he purposefully tries to carry out at least one radical reform in parliament; Ana’s rebellion is spontaneously emotional and obviously hopeless: if Pablo believes, at least in himself, and does not retreat from the desired-conceived to the end, then Ana will not cope with the constant struggle, and the rare bursts of activity when she is able to commit an act are replaced by protracted periods of emptiness and isolation in herself. However, despite the different nature of their rebelliousness, both cannot change anything, and in this doom they are united.
Undoubtedly, the two love each other – Ana’s obsession leads Pablo to the most remote corners of the city, where she wanders all day long, silent, detached; love and passion, inseparably, lie in wait for her in Pablo’s face at every turn. And her voice-over confirms that Pablo's power over her is absolute and undivided, she is his and only his. Why do they not look at each other with their eyes, eyes, and eyes? At first, it is obvious that Ana’s mother would not have allowed this relationship to take place, but after her death, when the world on the other side of the screen is filled with hopelessness and bitter regret about the impossibility of Ana and Pablo’s love, the viewer is puzzled: what prevents them now, especially since Ana’s father does not revere his young friend, Deputy Aguirre?
The problem, of course, is not the impossibility of sex; it is the hatred of one’s body, the hatred of oneself as a life-bending principle of existence. Including religious. After all, God diminished to incarnate in the human body and called himself Christ. He marked sinful flesh with his divine sign—isn’t that sufficient reason for inspiration, for love of his body? But Ana fears and hates everything that has anything to do with the body, and being unable to love and accept her body, of course she rejects Pablo’s body, and with the body everything else that is connected with it, because spirit, soul and body are inseparable. The tragedy is that there is no place in society for a spirit without a body; the only way not to perish is to devote oneself to public service like Mother Teresa or Diane Fossey. Ana is doomed to a hopeless existence in the urban jungle, in a closed world, where there is no opportunity for her not only to reveal her divine potential, but elementary to realize herself as a wife and mother, because in her world of absurd pseudo-Christian bigotry, all joy, even the joy of motherhood, is killed, and there is only fear and hatred. In his attempts to refute the hypocrisy of Christian and bourgeois morality, Torre Nilsson is close to Buñuel and Peter Mullan with his “Sisters of Magdalene”, only if Buñuel had enough sarcasm to detach himself from the prejudices of the society that nurtured him, and Mullan, in turn, to give optimism to give hope for the victory of the human spirit over obsolete concepts and taboos, then for the suffering Ana in “House of Angel”, the creator did not abandon hope not only for a happy, but in general for any outcome.
Christianity, in essence, is a creative and flighty religion: in a world ruled by love, in which the divine Demiurge created a likeness of himself, a person endowed with an immortal soul, the ability to love and create, nothing is impossible. But the wings of love and inspiration that this religion could give are very often mercilessly cut off by its overzealous and down-to-earth ministers, our brothers and sisters in Christ.