the dead love
by Douglas Messerli
Manoel
de Oliveira (writer and director) O
Estranho Caso de Angélica (The
Strange Case of Angelica) / 2010
Based on his
script of 1952, Manoel de Oliveira’s The
Strange Case of Angelica has a kind
of dated feeling to it, as if an early postwar film of ideas had gotten
interleaved with a 1950s romance, making it somehow as ill-matched as are this
work’s central characters, one a Sephardic Jew, Isaac (Ricardo Trépa) and the
other, Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala), a devout Roman Catholic—one a very much
alive young man and the other a woman who has recently died.
On the other hand, perhaps, the handsome Isaac may not truly be that
alive, and the dead woman, might not be truly dead. Isaac, a photographer,
spends most of his life transforming living beings into still images, and, as
he tells his well-meaning but intrusive landlady, Madam Justina (Adelaide
Teixeira), he prefers to focus on people doing things in “the old ways,”
snapping photos of day laborers who till an olive orchard by hand rather than
using machines. Although the beautiful Angélica is reported as being dead by
her wealthy family, she nonetheless, appears to open her eyes and beckon him
when he attempts to photograph her, having been hired to create a picture for
the family album. That eye-opening action later appears to be caught even
within the photograph itself.
When, soon after, Angélica begins to
visit Isaac during the nights, taking her apparent new lover on magical flights
over the city, Isaac can only wonder whether he’s losing his mind, or wonder,
at the very least, whether he has been struck by antimatter that his
well-educated fellow boarders speak about.
The trouble is that we never do discover why the dead woman, wife to
another grieving man, chooses to visit Isaac, or even how he has so quickly
been smitten by her corpse.
As always, director Oliveira beautifully
composes every shot, and creates such a
slow pace for his film that the viewer can savor every detail as if many scenes
were themselves simply snapshots. The
Strange Case of Angelica is clearly a movie about images, in which nearly
every shot becomes a kind of picturesque still. But the problem is that once
the director has set up this simple plot device he seems to have nowhere to go
with it, and even the beauty of images cannot hide the stagnancy of his story.
The boarders quote gnomic statements from Oretega y Gasset and other
thinkers; Isaac picks up one of his books a reads a few lines of poetry
speaking of just such an angel as he finds in Angélica; but nothing coherent is
made of these events. The only trail of logic we are given comes in the form of
the words of consternation and worriment from Madam Justina as she gossips with
the others about Isaac’s increasingly strange behavior.
And the final dénouement, in the form of the appearance of a bird flying
in Isaac’s room during the night and the death of Madam Justina’s beloved caged
bird the next morning, is so cryptically presented that we can only grasp at
the reasons for Isaac’s immediate dash, soon after, across town to visit his
ghost-lover’s crypt before he falls into a deathly faint.
The actions of these last scenes are
staged, moreover, so theatrically and artificially that we might as well be
watching a kind of moralistic pageant play rather than the fantasy we thought
we had been witnessing. What might have seemed to be a story love that
transcends even death seems to have become a kind of vampire tale.
Is Isaac’s death a kind of warning for those who abandon their faith for
emotional fulfillment, who give up everyday reality for pure sensate beauty?
Surely the mix of photographs of the simple laborers hung beside that of his
languid beauty suggest another kind of opposition within Isaac’s inner life.
Or has the antimatter supposedly hovering in our upper atmosphere, like
a kind of black hole, truly begun to swallow up, as the breakfasting
pontificators suggest, the living. If
the film seems to hint at being a kind of fable, it is difficult to comprehend
what it is telling us. Are we to take joy in Isaac’s and Angélica’s after-life
romance or, as Madam Justina does, see it as an evil omen? Oliveira clearly
isn’t saying. It is simply “a strange case” in which the dead fall in love.
Los
Angeles, December 10, 2010
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