NYFF 2010: "The Strange Case of Angelica"

One aspect of the recent films of Portuguese dir­ect­or Manoel de Oliveira I get the biggest charge from is their dis­curs­ive­ness. The nearly 102-year-old film­maker has been work­ing at near-Fassbinder levels of pro­ductiv­ity since about the turn of the cen­tury (and was­n’t exactly slouch­ing in the ’90s and ’80s), and I haven’t been able to keep up entirely, but I always enjoy the loose expans­ive­ness he applies to the forms of even his shortest fea­tures (and two of my favor­ites, 2006’s Belle Toujours, a droll and unex­pec­tedly delight­ful homage to Buñuel, and 2009’s shaggy-dog romance Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, each clocked in some­where under 80 minutes each). The nar­rat­ives, such as they are, are gen­er­ally crisp, clear, cogent, albeit some­times on the slight side (as if I ever cared about that sort of thing, right?); but while the courses of his films of the past few years nev­er jar the view­er right off of their paths, the jour­ney from begin­ning to end is grace­fully strewn with enga­ging side trips, as it were. They’re often in the form of ostens­ibly “off-topic” con­ver­sa­tions, as in the obser­va­tions on mod­ern man­ners in Belle Toujours or the bits involving the nature of the male prot­ag­on­ist’s busi­ness deal­ings in Eccentricities. One of the most charm­ing such bits in Oliveira’s latest pic­ture, The Strange Case of Angelica, involves a con­ver­sa­tion about anti-matter dur­ing a break­fast scene in a little Régua pen­sion where Isaac, the pic­ture’s ostens­ible hero, lives. The fel­low has­n’t even come down from his room yet, and two older gen­tle­men and the pen­sion’s keep­er and two eld­erly gen­tle­men dis­cuss the nature of the universe. 

As for the young man Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), his uni­verse is mutat­ing, thanks to his poten­tial dis­cov­ery of, as he says to him­self, “that place of abso­lute love I’ve heard about…which ban­ishes all the anguish I feel.” Said love resid­ing, as it hap­pens, with a recently dead young woman whom Isaac was roused from his bed to doc­u­ment in her beau­teous unan­im­ated state. Except that through his view­find­er, as he snapped away at her pla­cid vis­age, she seemed to smile at him. And now, as he looks at the pho­to­graphs of her that he’s hung to dry, her face again comes to life, and smiles at him. And her black-and-white ghost comes to his bal­cony, and takes him fly­ing over the Tagus river by night. Isaac is a Sephardic Jew, some­thing of a stranger in this land—although the film does­n’t place too much emphas­is on that. The fam­ily of Isaac’s new love Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) is old, and rich, and Catholic, and their maid looks at Isaac with a gim­let, to say the least, eye. Will these obstacles—not to men­tion the fact that Angelica has, you know, joined the choir invis­ible and all—keep the lov­ers apart? As you might expect, it’s not so much the ques­tion’s answer that’s of interest as the get­ting to it, and the pecu­li­ar jux­ta­pos­i­tions Oliviera throws in along with his discourses—Isaac’s pho­to­graph­ic fas­cin­a­tion with some manu­al laborers who, in his pho­tos, come off like garden-implement-wielding killers out of early ’60s Hammer films—keep the atmo­sphere enga­ging, intox­ic­at­ing. The spe­cial effects are attract­ive but also have an old-school feel that keeps you in the con­tinu­ity of Melies, Feiullade, and finally Franju; indeed, Angelica often struck me as a differently-hued vari­ation on Philippe Garrel’s 2008 ghost/amour fou story La fron­tiere de l’aube, which also wears its styl­ist­ic debt to those film­makers with stol­id, trend-resistant pride. Angelica is not neces­sar­ily “light­er” than Garrel’s film, but it is a bit cozi­er. And, like Garrel’s vis­ion, it is not in the least bit coy about being its own strange thing. I’ve taken the quote from Rossellini about Chaplin’s A King In New York out of my bag quite a few times, and I’m going to do it again, because it com­pletely applies here: “It is the film of a free man.”