The Strange Case of Angelica

Cannes (Un Certain Regard opening film) - Manuel de Oliveira’s latest film feels like it’s from another era – perhaps not surprising since he adapted it from a project he conceived in 1952, inspired by the displacement of surviving Jews after the Second World War. But, asks Emma Rowley, is its story of love in death relevant today?

Photographer Isaac is called to the house of a wealthy family in the middle of the night to photograph Angelica, a lovely young woman who died a few days after her marriage. When he arrives, Angelica has been arranged in a lifelike pose on a chaise longue and Isaac sets about framing the shot. To his shock, when he views her through the lens of his camera, she opens her eyes and smiles at him. He leaves, haunted by the image and in the following days, first the photograph and then the spirit of Angelica herself begin to torment him with the promise of unearthly love.

From the first moments of The Strange Case of Angelica, the film’s salient feature is its gentle pace. The opening scene, in which a member of the household staff stops at a photographer’s shop to find someone to take the picture the family desires, would probably be excised from most scripts today. For the first photographer to be approached is not Isaac, the film’s protagonist, but an unnamed man who is not even at home. His wife chides the family’s representative for waking her but cannot help, and it in fact falls to a passer-by to suggest Isaac himself. It sets the scene – Isaac, an unknown young man who lives in a boarding house, would not be a first choice for the family – but in most films, you would expect that morsel of information to be presented more economically. But this is certainly not most films and its points of difference should not surprise since writer/director Oliveira is 102 years of age and the world’s oldest living film director.

It’s not only the pace that evokes another time but the characterisation of Isaac himself. He is a young man as mouthpiece for an older one, or at the least a young man from a very different period, though the film is set in the modern day. He is romantic, serious, a declaimer of poetry and a smoker. He is as atavistic as the olive grove workers who he photographs tilling the soil by hand. Likewise the apparition of Angelica, whose appearance – sometimes in black and white, always in the white wedding gown she was buried in – recalls the heroines of gothic fiction, to the point of utter kitsch.

That Oliveira intends us to take her seriously is evident. The film has frequent moments of humour, often involving Isaac’s kindly landlady, but Angelica has a serious purpose in the film as a ghostly memento mori. More than that, she embodies Isaac’s own death drive, or as Oliveira himself puts it, his “search for love that can only be found in death itself”. In this respect, the film is timeless, dealing in absolutes of experience. Isaac’s descent into obsession is handled almost matter-of-factly, since the director takes it for granted that this desire is explicable to all. It is much like Heathcliffe’s death by starvation when he is plagued by desire to be with the ghost of Cathy in Wuthering Heights.

More problematic are Oliveira’s later interpolations, including a conversation between two engineers over breakfast. The original discussion was over the plight of the Jews who had been persecuted during the war. In its place is a discussion about energy, matter and anti-matter that sits oddly with the rest of the film. 

Watching The Strange Case of Angelica is a culture shock that you feel slowly, a window into a world that is theatrical and distant. But this reviewer suggests you relish every moment of a cinematic style that is surely slipping away from us.

Rating on a scale of 5 figures beckoning at your window: 4

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Manoel de Oliveira
Written by: Manoel de Oliveira
Cast: Ricardo Trepa, Pilar Lopez de Ayala, Leonor Silveira, Luis Miguel Cintra, Ana Maria Magalhaes, Isabel Ruth
Rating: TBC
Running time: 95 minutes