The man looks into the viewfinder to get the right angle on the dead woman. The family has dressed her in white, he’s set up his own light to bask the subject, and mourners circle him in the shadowed edges of the room. The dead woman’s smiling before he takes her portrait—smiling like on her wedding day, the family says. As he pulls focus, her eyes open and smile widens. Back in his apartment, the photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is checking his prints of the portraits, and the dead woman smiles for him again. It would seem that his lens has not just captured the physical reality in front of it, but the light exposing his negative has transmuted a spiritual energy as well.
The Strange Case of Angelica (2011) is the penultimate film of Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira. It’s my first with the old man, so I can’t speak to its cumulative affectations with regards to de Oliveira’s extraordinarily long career—stretching back into the early-1930s and into the 2010s. With de Oliveira being 101 when The Strange Case of Angelica came out, it’s natural that the filmmaker would be lingering on death towards the inevitable twilight of his career. But unlike the drudging self-seriousness of, say, Michael Haneke’s reflection on again that was supposed to be his retirement film, Amour (2012), de Oliveira focuses on a youthful energy while putting his elderly characters on the periphery as a chorus to the actions and follies of young people.
Isaac’s obsession with Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) is immediate and obsessive. Her haunting injects a sense of freedom into his life when she visits him in his dreams, carrying him through the night sky and high above the fields whose peasant workers he likes to photograph back on Earth. In Heaven there’s no labor, and in images everything’s a ghost. Every time Isaac wakes up, he’s terrified. Not because the ghost is pulling him into a horror movie, but instead because it’s beckoning him out of his everyday reality. Here, again, Angelica’s ghost seems to be something of a metaphor for cinema itself, a liberation that can only be had in a dark room, before the light of the world spills back in.
The setting of de Oliveira’s film feels oddly anachronistic. Its ostensibly contemporary world is constantly interrupted by all the people we see on camera. The opening shot features a new car driving down a rainy old street, with the driver waking a wife of a photo shopkeeper, both just a little formal in their dress. Isaac wears dark jackets and linen shirts, and when he arrives at the wealthy estate to photograph Angelica, everyone from the relatives to the maids are wearing attire that could be from 100 years ago. Isaac’s simple apartment with plaster walls and a standing sink invoke a different era than the modern trucks that pass by his window, as does his film camera and at-home development setup. This isn’t de Oliveira’s tastes being grossly outdated for a century he’s out of place in, but an intentional contrast. Take, for instance, the farm laborers Isaac photographs, who are dressed in sweaters and wool rather than synthetic work wear. They themselves disappear towards the end of the film, replaced with a tractor.
The world of songs and solidarity of the people ploughing the fields is going away, preserved in fraught memory. De Oliveira’s near 80-year career at the time of The Strange Case of Angelica has collected countless ghosts, keeping them alive in a single moment in front of the lens forever, being able to smile anytime we look at them. They aren’t really alive though, no matter how good they are at tricking us. It’s funny how easy it is to fall in love with these burned pieces of plastic emulsion when they’re shown back to us as shadows, how much they can consume our lives and pull us away, pull us back even as the world keeps changing around us—de Oliveira seemed to have thought it funny as well.