the dead love
by Douglas Messerli
Manoel
de Oliveira (writer and director) O
Estranho Caso de Angélica (The
Strange Case of Angelica) / 2010
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.
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.
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.
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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