The murder of Angela Denise, the subject of the miniseries that premieres on Thursday (13), is a difficult case to explain since the victim had a complex and multifaceted personality. Duca Street, the man who killed her in December 1976, with four shots, three of them in the face, was sentenced in 1979 to a symbolic 18-month prison sentence.
Lawyer Evaristo de Moraes Filho persuaded the jury to accept the “legitimate defense of honour” thesis, and part of the audience in court applauded him when he said the Minas Gerais socialite was “insolent, a brute, a classy whore from Babylon, a girl who wants to die.”
An example of the difficulty of summarizing this plot can be seen in Hugo Prata’s film “Angela,” released in September 2023 and available on Prime. The director chose to tell the story of Angela’s last four months, the period during which she dated Duca, which is not long enough to understand the drama. Among other errors, the film ends with a long close-up of the face of not the victim, but of the killer, with an expression of sadness.
The miniseries “Angela Denise, Murdered and Convicted” goes much further. You can already see in the title the care to make the point of the story written by Elena Suarez and directed by Andrucha Waddington. A banner at the beginning of the first episode adds: “Angela was beautiful, free, and crazy. Or so they said. And it was all dangerous in the ’70s.”
The HBO Max program seeks to explain the fact that Angela decided to separate from her husband, a successful businessman, whom she married when she was 17 years old and he was 31 years old. “You know, between us (the marriage) hasn’t even begun,” she says. They had three children, but the miniseries shows the couple with only one girl. The time frame and simplification regarding family size are signs that Angela Diniz’s drama didn’t quite fit into the six 45-minute episodes.
The series is loosely inspired by the podcast “Praia dos Ossos”, from Radio Novello, presented by Branca Viana, with text by Flora Thompson-Defo, Paola Scarpin, Aurelio de Aragão and Rafael Spinola.
The show aired in 2020, with eight episodes lasting an average of 55 minutes each. Praia dos Ossos had a huge impact not only because of the drama it conveyed, with high-quality research and reporting, but because of the way it presented the story. Branca informs Viana, gives her opinion, alerts the listener to important details of the plot and reveals the protagonist from many angles.
In Praia dos Ossos, the story begins in Angela’s childhood. It shows how she was “taught to seduce” by her mother, the school, and the environment in which she lived. The podcast, unlike the miniseries, names all the characters and puts them in context, a culmination of the elites of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Before Doka, Angela dated columnist Ibrahim Sweid, and the relationship was tense and dramatic and not as smooth as it appears in the series.
With the exceptional Marjorie Estiano as the protagonist, an excellent cast and a good period reconstruction, the miniseries tells, in a very engaging way, a very sad story, but it doesn’t reach the intensity of a podcast.
It is worth noting a note from Branca Viana: “The murder of Angela Diniz was not the result of an isolated case, of a man out of control, acting on a temporary impulse due to the mood of his girlfriend. It was the reaction of an ordinary man of the time, brought up with the values of the time, and formed to fear a woman following his desires. Consequently, he was created to act violently when he encountered such a woman.”
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