安吉里卡奇遇

Thanatological obsession comes aptly for a centenarian filmmaker-in-action (inconceivable but miracles happen), Portugal’s national treasure Manoel de Oliveira was 101 years young when he shot THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA, his penultimate feature, he would pass away in 2015, aged 106.

Set in an unspecified modern age (no cellphone or computer on show, the story goes that de Oliveira germinates the script almost six decades earlier, in the 1940s, which can well account for the film’s overall démodé tone), Sephardic photographer Isaac (Trêpa, a bland, even anemic leading man), lodging in a town near Porto, is hired to take some photographs of a young lady Angelica (de Ayala), who has just deceased and lies beatifically on her deathbed with an impeccable smile.

Seen through his viewfinder, Angelica comes alive right in front of his eyes and smiles to him, even only for a split second, first startled, then bewitched (after A second visitation occurs after the photos are developed and hung on a line to dry), Isaac has an out-of-body experience with in his dream (de Oliveira and CGI technology make strange bedfellows). Henceforth, he becomes perversely retiring, glassy-eyed, refusing food intake (save the morning coffee), perpetually wallows in his own woolgathering and is deemed weird by the lodging’s other tenants and the over-hospitable landlady Justina (Teixeira), even his Luddite disposition (“old-fashioned ways interest me”), which de Oliveira initially makes heavy weather of, fizzles out while Isaac returns frequently to Angelica’s family. But what is he looking for, perchance even himself has no clue (all he gets is some glimpses of the family photo book). Exclaiming “Angelica” like a Cotard-inflicted walking dead, Isaac’s death-seeking, spirit-consummating wish never reaches an empathetic plane for audience to project our compassion, it is arrhythmic, unthinking and self-defeating.

Having said that, THE STRANGE CASE…. is not entirely a misfire, de Oliveira still flourishes with his painterly instinct, divine compositions and chromatic understatement. Whether steeped in Chopin’s plinking virtuosity or basking in laborers’ collective, monotonous marching songs, we should only feel blessed and inspired by de Oliveira’s age-and-agism-defying quiddity, film is his Angelica and now they are finally and eternally indivisible in empyrean.

referential entries: de Oliveira’s VOYAGE TO THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD (1997, 7.0/10); João Pedro Rodrigues’ THE ORNITHOLOGIST (2016, 6.5/10).