An air of “magical realism” flows through “The Strange Case of Angelica,” a new film by Portugal’s 102-year-old filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira. A ghost may or may not be on the loose here.
We make the acquaintance of a young photographer, Isaac, played by Oliveira’s grandson, Ricardo Trepa. He lives in a boardinghouse, where the guests often seem to sit around the table discussing current events.
One night he is summoned to the home of a wealthy family. A beautiful young woman has died and the family would like her photographed as she lies, still lovely, on a couch in their parlor.
Isaac points his camera at this strange scene, which gets stranger: Through his lens, he sees the dead woman smile at him.
That moment becomes an obsession for the young photographer, who can’t shake the image of Angelica (she even seems to break into a smile in one of his developed photographs, for a second).
He tries to clear his head by photographing workers in the fields, but his mind keeps wandering from the earthly to the otherworldly.
Oliveira’s previous film, an absolute gem, was “Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl,” which clocked in at 60 minutes. “Angelica” is 97 minutes long, but there’s something about it that might have worked better at an hour; it has a tendency to dawdle through sideplots that are sometimes delightful, sometimes puzzling.
The film is made so confidently and handsomely that it just does get by with its sometimes murky purposes. It helps that Oliveira has room for magical touches, such as Isaac’s night flight with his ghostly beloved, a sequence that might have come out of a silent film.
It will convey some of the flavor of the movie if I say that one long dialogue sequence concludes with a cat sitting on the floor of a room, staring at a bird in a cage with the furious focus a cat can bring to such a situation. Oliveira opts to hold on this shot for quite a while.
We might ponder that the cat and Isaac are both single-mindedly set on their object of desire, or we might conclude that Oliveira spotted a wonderful moment and decided to let his camera simply keep running for the sheer pleasure of it. Either way works, which might be a good rule of thumb to consider when deciding how to read this movie.
“The Strange Case of Angelica” (3 stars)
A young photographer becomes obsessed after taking a picture of a dead woman and seeing her smile in his lens. This enigma remains unanswered in this handsome (if overlong) film by 102-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who indulges in moments of magical realism to create his mood. In Portuguese, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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