O Estranho Caso de Angelica (The Strange Case of Angelica), Portugal, 2010, 97 mins

Director/writer: Manoel de Oliveira
With: Pilar Lopez de Ayala, Jose Manuel Mendes, Ricardo Trepa

Rating: M

Presented by the Embassy of Portugal as part of The Latin American Film Festival, 2012

Isaac is a young photographer living in a boarding house in Régua. In the middle of the night, he receives an urgent call from a wealthy family to come and take the last photograph of their daughter, Angelica, who died just a few days after her wedding. Arriving at the house of mourning, Isaac gets his first glimpse of Angelica and is overwhelmed by her beauty. As soon as he looks at her through the lens of his camera, the young woman appears to come back to life just for him. Isaac instantly falls in love with her. From that moment on, Angélica will haunt him night and day, until exhaustion.

“Both a romance and a ghost story, Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica tells its tale of love and death with a captivating mix of formality, ambiguity and offbeat humor. On the surface a simple fable, it's actually much more. The film has the lucidity and seeming straightforwardness of a veteran filmmaker, and that's certainly what Oliveira is. He directed his first feature in 1942, and made this film last year at age 101. He came up with the screenplay that developed into this movie in 1952, so he's had plenty of time to think about it. A young photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), living in a boardinghouse in Portugal's Douro vineyard country, is summoned one rainy night to a rich family's estate to photograph Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala), a young bride who has died on her wedding day. She's an ethereal beauty, posed in archaic fashion on a fainting couch, wearing her wedding dress and holding a bouquet. After a startling incident - possibly imagined? - Isaac becomes obsessed with Angelica, who in one remarkable scene visits him in ghostly form - perhaps it's a dream - and takes him on a fantastical airborne journey over the nighttime countryside. The special effect is unpolished in a way that suggests the early days of filmmaking. Other events take place. We see Isaac, whose Jewishness seems to put off Angelica's kin, photographing vineyard workers, and hear oblique and comical conversations of fellow boarders and the sturdy woman who runs the boarding house. All think Isaac is behaving a little strangely. But the heart of the tale is the relationship of Isaac, who seems half in another world himself, and Angelica's spirit. The artist and outsider is totally captivated by the dead woman and drawn into her world. Oliveira employs a quiet, seemingly straightforward style that uses tableaux and a minimum of camera movement, fitting for a story about a photographer. The film is beautifully shot by Sabine Lancelin... If certain moments in The Strange Case of Angelica remind you of Buñuel's work, it's not your imagination. Oliveira is an admirer of the great Spanish filmmaker, to the extent of having directed a sequel to his Belle de Jour." – Walter Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle, 7/1/2011