The Strange Case of Angelica

05 Dez The Strange Case of Angelica

In the transition between the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, over a period of inactivity as a film director, Manoel de Oliveira goes to the Douro Wine region. In this place, the director re-evaluates and thinks the cinema. During this period, Manoel de Oliveira writes arguments for movies that never left the drawer, as well as films that would only be directed several decades later. This is what happened to The Strange Case of Angelica, a plot that was born from a personal experience of the film director.
The plot of the film takes place in the fifties, and accompanies Isaac, a young Jewish man, a professional photographer who is called to the home of an aristocratic family to photograph a young newly deceased, in order to obtain a final picture that can be included in the album family. This young woman, Angelica, immediately takes the attention of the photographer, while she’s on a couch, with a wedding dress, long blond hair, angelic, beautiful smile. An unexpected contact with the spirit of Angelica will make Isaac develop a deep obsession with the girl, thought his portraits, whose images seem to come alive in your mind. The spirit of Angelica comes to torment him day and night, going gradually get loose the spirit of the boy’s body, creating one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie when the spirits of the two come together overnight, with the two spirits fly over clouds and the Douro river, in a scene that brings us back to the beginnings of cinema, especially the works of George Méliés.
The Strange Case of Angelica is a film on the best style of Manoel de Oliveira, a case where the film director offers a reflection through paradoxes as life and death, the absolute and the ephemeral, material and mystical at the same time which presents us with beautiful landscapes, especially the Douro.
It is essentially a film about cinema, a film about an attraction for film and the way it allows an alternate world where everything is possible, even a love story with a dead girl.