Originally published 4th April 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.
In Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica, a young photographer falls in love with a dead girl. The family of Angelica, a recently married, wealthy young woman who has died, request the services of a photographer, Isaac, to take her picture as "one last souvenir, even if it is very sad," her sister explains.He does so, but as he's setting the focus, Angelica's eyes open and she smiles at him, impossibly, and he falls deeply in love with her. They're together in vivid dreams, but, in the real world, they couldn't be further apart.
Oliveira, who was 106 when he died, and 101 when he made this, is a master of efficient storytelling. His camera is mostly static, sometimes panning across a scene to accommodate the movement of a tractor or a character running through town, and usually angled in such a way to create an extraordinary sense of depth. He holds shots for a long time and rarely cuts between speakers in conversations, instead observing scenes unfold from a carefully composed master-shot. Wide-angle shots show the same view of a Portuguese town multiple times, with varying weather conditions and light levels to suggest the passing of time, while a series of recurring images: a decorative fountain, a statue pointing down a street, a forgetful beggar, a beautiful church; are encountered in a specific order again and again to map the town's geography, helping to establish exactly where Isaac is and where he is going at any given time.
The film takes place in present-day Portugal, but the only clues as to the time period are the modern vehicles on the roads, first encountered as a means to transport Isaac from his quaint boarding house room in town to Angelica's family mansion on the outskirts, and later as the source of the unwelcome drone outside his window that brings Isaac back to reality from his dreams of Angelica. This modern setting frames Isaac as an anachronism. He wears old-fashioned clothes: dress shirts, thick cardigans, panama hats, blazers; all in black, white or grey; his camera is an early analogue SLR, which he carries in a brown-leather strapped box; and he fills his grey-walled apartment with antique mahogany furniture. At breakfast one day after he meets Angelica, three engineers are talking about science and economics at the table, while Isaac stands facing the window with his coffee, distanced from them and their conversation. He rejects modern life by living in the past, and he falls in love with a dead girl.
But is that so hard to understand when the dead girl looks so alive? Even before Isaac sees her smile, two mourners at her wake discuss how alive she looks, before de Oliveira cuts to their perspective of her as if to prove them right, which, of course, they are. The vitality of her corpse is paradoxical, but it's inside this paradox that Isaac and Angelica live, together in a dream world. But, like the caged bird in the boarding house and the goldfish in the tiny bowl in the mansion, Isaac is living in shackles: he has a physical presence in the real world while Angelica exists only in his dreams, and as long as they're apart he can never be free. This is what makes the film so sincere. Oliveira makes their relationship feel real, even though it doesn't exist.
In his final dream, Angelica appears floating above Isaac's bed, and the two reach out to each other, never quite making the contact they crave so much. It's a frustrated image of two people brought together by fate and divided by circumstance, their relationship doomed to fail. The question Oliveira is posing, however, is simple: what if it exists elsewhere?