"At night he stands up, the distant call of birds already deep
inside him; and feels bold, because he has taken all the galaxies into
his face."
Rainer Maria Rilke
To the contemplative background of a Chopin Sonata, 102-year old Manoel
de Oliviera's The Strange Case of Angelica is a quietly masterful
meditation on the thin line between the present and the past and
between this world and the next. Even after half a century of making
movies, The Strange Case of Angelica shows that Oliviera is willing to
take risks and explore issues that most directors stay far away from.
Winner of numerous awards at Cannes and Venice, Oliviera's camera is
often static and even by standards of art cinema, the film is slow,
yet, even though it can be heavy-going at times, it is atmospheric,
moody, and spiritually informed, filled with the truth of life.
In the middle of a rainy night, Isaac (Ricardo Trepa), a Sephardic
Jewish photographer, is summoned by wealthy hotel owners to take photos
of their daughter, Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala), who has
suddenly died. A beautiful bride dressed in her wedding gown with a
hint of a smile on her face, Isaac is immediately captured by her
presence and magically sees Angelica open her eyes and smile at him
through the lens of his camera. He becomes obsessed with Angelica,
dreaming of her angelic smile, and starts to withdraw from the outside
world. He becomes, in the phrase of John Banville, “all inwardness,
gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which
nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is.”
The landlady of the boarding house where he is staying notices Isaac's
odd behavior and sullen disposition and comments to her other guests
that he has become strange. One night, as he stands in the dining room,
he sees a group of workers tilling the soil and singing work songs as
they would have done in the 1950s and rushes out to the vineyard to
photograph them. Underlying the director's view that beauty has
disappeared from modern life, when the same scene appears again later
in the film, the work is being done by noisy overbearing machines and
the sweet music of the worker's song has been replaced by the roar of
the tiller's engine.
As his fellow boarders and a pair of engineers take their meals, they
talk about the cancellation of a bridge-building project, the
difference between matter and anti-matter, and the current economic
climate, yet Isaac stands aloof sipping on coffee and shows little
interest. One night Angelica's spirit appears and reaches out to him
through the dimensions and hovers over his sleeping body. In a vivid
out-of-body experience, he takes her hand as they soar together through
the clouds above farms and villages, in rapturous embrace.
Though Isaac talks about, "that strange reality” saying, “perhaps it
was just a hallucination, but it was just as real as waking life," the
experience binds him ever closer to Angelica and, as if gripped by a
sudden feverish insanity, loses his grip on the everyday world around
him. Though at times lacking in lightness of spirit, The Strange Case
of Angelica is the work of a master who challenges us to see the
“absolutely unbroken continuity” between life and death, informing us
with his camera that love is forever, that life is forever.
GRADE: A-
Seen at the Vancouver International Film Festival
