The Strange Case of Angélica

The Strange Case of Angélica ( O Estranho Caso de Angélica) (2010) I saw last night is indeed a bizarre little piece of Portuguese cinema from one of the oldest living directors, Manoel de Oliveira. According to the Wikipedia, he was born in Porto, Portugal on 11th December, 1908 to a land owning industrialist family and has been producing films since 1931, when he turned out Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary and in 1942, his first feature film Aniki-Bóbó about the street children in Oporto. He first trained as an actor in Germany and in 1933 acted in the second ever Portuguese non-silent film, A Canção de Lisboa. After the flop of Aniki-Bóbó, he abandoned making films and devoted the next quarter century to just running his family vineyard and did not return to film making until 1956, when he made The Artist and the City. Since 1990, he has continued to produce one film a year for pleasure rather than necessity. He won two Career Golden Lions in 1985 and 2004 and a Palm d'Or in Cannes for lifetime achievement in 2008. To him, art is always linked to existence and religion. His last film before Angélica is Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura ( The Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl) (2009).

The film begins with a death. A local photography addict Isaac ( played by Ricardo Trépa) using the now old fashioned methods of celluloid and silver bromide dark room development techniques was called in by the governess of an estate close to the small ancient Portuguese town to photograph Angélica, the married daughter of a very rich local family (played by Pilar López de Ayala,). He was led by her sister, a nun, to where Angélica's mother, friends and relatives were gathered in a room deep within an old castle. When he first laid eyes on her, he found her in her bridal dress, with a heavenly smile, sleeping peacefully on a divan. He was struck by her beauty. He asked for the another lightbulb, was given one, cahnged it cautiously and started to click his shutter. He adjusted his focus. Something happened: he thought he saw her open her eyes, looking directly into his own eyes through his camera's lens. He thought it was an illusion and continued. She opened her eyes again. Frightened, he quickly finished what he had to do by taking a few more shots and left in a big hurry. But that was not the end. 

He returned home, developed the color prints of Angélica, amidst a stack of other black and white prints on field hands working in the nearby hillside vineyards using the old fashioned method of digging the ground with hoes to the sound of call-and-response of a Portuguese work song sung by a leader and answered by the labor gang. He found the eyes of the Angélica in the color print opening again! He was surprised. He left the table where the photographs were to calm himself. He stood close to the door through which we can see the surrounding fields and distant hills, with his back against it. Then we see the black and white image of Angélica appear behind him in front of the door, twice. But each time, Isaac turned around, she disappeared. From that point on, although he continued to take black and white photographs, he became more and more distracted and obsessed by the image of Angélica.

Then Isaac began to have dreams. She appeared above his bed. He reached out his hands towards her. She took them and led him through the door of his room and carried him over into the sky on a trip over the little town in the air, Peter-Pan like, all the while were facing each other. 

Reality in the film was represented by the heavy rumbling of gas tanker trucks constantly running on the road below the room of the pension where Isaac is living and by the fattish landlady, the owner of the pension. She constantly said that Isaac must not be so absorbed by his work and even if he were, he ought to take time off to take his breakfast and his meals. There were other lodgers in her pension: a retired engineer, a university professor and another young lady. They would meet for breakfast every morning. They would usually wait for Isaac to come before they start and in the meantime, would chit chat. They were talking about a bridge project which was cancelled because of the economic crisis. The word crisis triggered the professor into talking about Ortega Y Gasset's book "Man in Crisis" which I mentioned in an earlier blog, into the marvels of science, in particular of the mysteries of quantum physics, in which scientists have found both matter and anti-matter constantly turning into one another, with the boundaries between being and nothingness, between so-called "reality" and fantasy getting increasingly blurred. But even when Isaac did come down, he would merely take a cup of coffee and not join in the conversation. He would take his cup of coffee, walked to one side of the dining room, look out of the window, thinking, reflecting. He was living in a world of his own.

Oliveira appears to be fond of using enigmatic images, perhaps as symbols. Apart from the more obvious images in black and white of Isaac being taken for a ride high up in the starry night skies over the town and its river shimmering in the silence of the night, Isaac seems constantly being dogged by a beggar who would repeatedly ask him for money everytime he went to the church or the cemetery. Is he the alter ego of Isaac, who seems always to be begging for more from the same person? Angélica? There is also the iamge of a bird in a cage placed high up against one of the walls of the dining room of the pension, which seemed strangely immobile, which mysteriously died the morning after Isaac had the dream. In medieval folklore, a man's spirit or soul is sometimes compared to a little bird which would leave a man when he sleeps at night and would return in the morning, when he wakes up.

After another episode of imaginary encounter with Angélica, Isaac suddenly started to run towards the fields in the hillside. He ran and ran and ran until he collapsed out of sheer exhaustion and was discovered by a groups of children. He was brought back to his room, much to the annoyance of the landlady, who thought that he would only bring her bad luck.

An old doctor was called. He examined Isaac. He wanted some help from a nurse but she arrived too late. Isaac appeared too far gone. In a strange image, whilst the doctor was examining Isaac, lying apparently motionlessly on his bed, he stood up behind the doctor's back and a translucent white image of him walked towards the window. When the doctor examined him again, he was completely gone, a black and white image, (his soul? ) had flown past his studio and bedroom  door towards the hills. The film ends. 

Is Oliveira lamenting the passing of an age in which the human soul is still important, the age of protest against the alienation of man by machine, symbolized by Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, the age of what Ortega y Gasset described as the age of the mass man, the age of the colorful surrealism of Dali and the black and white surrealistm of Luis Buñuel? Issac still works in black and white. The images of the spirit of Angélica are also in black and white but the photograph of her real life corpse is in color. Is the breakfast table talk of Ortega y Gasset's Man in Crisis and the true boundaries of physics and the human psyche these coincidences? Are dreams, hallucination etc. as real for those having them as "ordinary" reality, as Isaac said at one point in the film? Are they not part of a hyper-reality, more real than "everyday" reality? A reality of the spirit? 

How could I fail to mention Oliveira's skilful use of the heavenly piano music of Chopin and Schubert, Pachebel. Is the silver screen not the space for dreams, a space where for an hour or so, our minds and our spirits are allowed to be freed from our bodies?