The Angel and Ash Is Purest White: Crime and Consequence in Cannes

Movies have been making crime look cool as long as there have been movies, so I really shouldnt be surprised to see a stylish, oddly sympathetic portrait of a serial killer pop up here at Cannes. But The Angel, an Argentinian film competing in Un Certain Regard, still caught me off guard. Its a super stylish film, directed by 37-year-old Argentinian television director Luis Ortega, and so energized by its captivating lead actor that you forget you are watching the story of Carlos Robledo Puch, a real-life murderer and rapist who committed most of his crimes when he was just in his teens. The movie is compelling in the moment, but seems irresponsible with any afterthought.

Ortega has clearly seen his fair share of Tarantino movies, and probably David Michôds Animal Kingdom (among others). He employs a familiar arch, artful approach to this material, with sleek gliding shots and kicky retro tunes offering vibrant housing for Puchs grim story. A neer-do-well kid whos been shipped from school to school and has a penchant for burglary, Carlitos, as hes called, gets away with his bad behavior because of his angelic good looks (hence the title) and sociopaths charm. Which is dangerous, since kids like this tend to escalate, as Carlitos does: he and a classmate, Ramon (Chino Darín), embark on a sexually charged string of daring robberies that quickly lead to murder.

The film stages most of this with dark, offbeat humor; Ortega gives Ramon a pair of wacky, complicit parents (Mercedes Morán and Daniel Fanego) and works pretty hard to make us fall in uneasy love with Carlitos. Im ashamed to say that it works. First-time film actor Lorenzo Ferro is beguiling in the role. Pouty lipped with a thicket of blond ringlets, hes an androgynous Botticelli creation come to life, reading insouciant instead of threatening with his dangling cigarette and clutched pistol. Ferro does more than just look the part, too. He smartly plays Carlitoss canny manipulativeness and the howling blankness behind it, eschewing actorly tics and simply being, somehow both stealthy and blunt.

When Puch was arrested, in 1972, there was much press about the nature of his relationship with his partner in crime (whose name has been changed), and The Angel offers some tease of that queerness. But it doesnt go past minor speculation—an odd demurral considering how much else the film invents, and omits. Its most glaring, and galling, elision is that Puch and his partner were involved in a number of rapes, killing the women after. Obviously, that doesnt quite fit with the movies irreverent, rebellious narrative, in which mostly anonymous security personnel are killed—so who really cares. (Of course we should care.) The film isnt necessarily obligated to tell the entire true story, but glossing over such a horrifying facet of Puchs crimes makes the whole thing seem a bit sleazy, like its cheating or, worse, lying to us.

But movies lie to us all the time, so maybe I shouldnt take such issue with what The Angel does and doesnt show or tell us. In a vacuum, the film is exciting—I want to see much more from Ortega and Ferro. But in its larger context, I cant imagine family and friends of Puchs victims will be happy that many who are unfamiliar with the story will only learn about it through the film, whose provocations favor Puch—serving as another indulgence of cinemas perhaps problematic obsession with beautiful beasts.

Crime is treated a bit more gravely in Ash Is Purest White, the latest main competition entry from revered Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke. Two gunshots fired into the air reshape the lives of Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Fan Liao), a moll and her mobster hustling out a living in a dying coal town in eastern China at the beginning of the new millennium. As evidenced by his films, Jia is, understandably, fascinated by the ways Chinas rapid economic expansion and modernization has affected its citizens, and Ash Is Purest White revisits many of the themes he explored so wistfully and wonderfully in his 2015 Cannes film Mountains May Depart.

Chinas progress in the last 20 or so years has undoubtedly altered the course of many Chinese citizens lives. But as Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White illustrate, that change can leave many feeling displaced, alienated, without access to the opportunity suddenly made available to their countrymen. In Ashs case, we see people dwelling on the fringes who both reach past those margins and return to them, the only familiar—and thus more navigable—places they know.

While defending her boyfriend from rival gangsters, Qiao fires two warning shots from an illegal pistol, leading to a five-year prison sentence. When she gets out, in 2006, Bin has disappeared into a life of legitimacy, and Qiao sets out on a quest to find him. This second section of Jias triptych film (a motif repeated from Mountains May Depart) is by far its strongest, a strange and searching journey through mid-aughts China that finds a country aching and exuberant with evolution. As Qiao rides a slow ferry through the Three Gorges, a tour guide on the P.A. system explains that soon all of this will be underwater, when the Three Gorges dams capacity is increased. I thought of that old adage, about a rising tide lifting all boats. Maybe it does. But surely some things are subsumed and drowned in that great swell.

I love the way Jia grapples with large social shifts in such metaphorical and yet still intimate ways, peering in on individual people caught in the churn of time and growth and framing them in the defining context of their surroundings. As Jia gazes and contemplates, his disposition is both wary and hopeful, concerned but resigned. His muse (and spouse) Zhao is wondrously expressive throughout the film, but in this second section she shines even more than she did in Mountains May Depart, communicating oceans of feeling—wonder, worry, sorrow, anger—with subtlety. (She also has a masterfully funny bit of on-screen eating, going to town on some noodles in a way that made me instantly hungry.)

I wish only that the rest of Ash Is Purest White could match its middles depth and quiet insight. As the film reaches the present, its ideas become harder to parse, while the story narrows into an unsatisfying and confusingly articulated tragic romance. Those more familiar with the nuances of Chinese culture and idiom will be better able to suss out what Jia is getting at in his films final scenes, but I was left yearning for some grander or more profound conclusion. Mountains May Depart has one of the greatest, most poignant film endings of the new century, and Ash Is Purest White at times feels capable of something even more melancholy and moving. But in rehashing so many of the themes in Mountains, Ash muddies itself, the point becoming blurrier in retelling.

There are, of course, no easy diagnoses or balms that can perfectly address the complexities of modern-day China as it lurches into the future. Though Jia at his best has seemed to come close, Ash Is Purest White brings him a little further from that clarity. Still, the film is an arresting and ambitious portrait of a nation how it is now, and how it so recently was. The title refers to things burned into their truest state by the fires of a volcano. The films characters find themselves passing through a crucible of their own. That they dont make it through by the end, reborn in purest form, may be the whole point. Or half the point, anyway. That they keep trekking on in their own way counts for a lot, too.

Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:Cannes Film Festival 2018: The Must-See LooksRichard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.