The Strange Case of Angelica ( O Estranho Caso de Angélica ) ( El extraño caso de Angélica )

The Strange Case of Angelica (DVD) (*)

$40.99

Original Title: O Estranho Caso de Angélica
Alternate Title: El extraño caso de Angélica
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Cannes Film Festival

Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
French ( Subtitles )
Portuguese ( Dolby Digital 5.1 )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
95 min + 55 min extras

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
Cast/Crew Interview(s)
Filmographies
Interactive Menu
Photo Gallery
Scene Access
Short Film
Trailer(s)

Movie filmed in 2010 and produced in:
Brazil ( Latin America, Mexico )
France ( France, Benelux )
Portugal ( Spain, Portugal )
Spain ( Spain, Portugal )

Directed By:
Manoel de Oliveira

Written By:
Manoel de Oliveira

Actors:
Pilar López de Ayala ..... Angélica
Ricardo Trêpa ..... Isaac
Leonor Silveira ..... Mãe
Filipe Vargas ..... Marido
Luís Miguel Cintra ..... Engenheiro
Ana Maria Magalhães ..... Clementina
Isabel Ruth ..... Criada
Paulo Matos ..... Homem da Gabardine
José Manuel Mendes ..... Dr. Matias
Carmen Santos ..... Mulher do Fotógrafo
Ricardo Aibéo ..... Mendigo
Susana Sá ..... D. Rosa
Adelaide Teixeira ..... Justina
Sara Carinhas ..... Freira
Sofia de Portugal ..... Enfermeira

Synopsis:

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.

What is the opposite of precocious? If no suitable word exists, somebody should invent one; in English, French or, ideally, Portuguese to describe the 102-year-old filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. He has completed a dozen features and a handful of shorts since 1998, which is to say since his 90th birthday. His latest feature, a tale of supernatural romance called 'The Strange Case of Angelica," arrives in New York on Wednesday, and while it is evidently the work of an artist with great stores of wisdom and a long view of history, it also has a playful, wry quality that can only be described as youthful. Unfolding in a present that might easily be mistaken for an earlier century, 'The Strange Case of Angelica" finds Mr. Oliveira casting his gaze both backward and forward. His setting, once again, is the landscape around the Douro Valley in northern Portugal, a region of vineyards and olive groves as well as old, aristocratic estates, and a familiar and beloved subject for his camera. (Among his first films was a documentary short called 'Labor on the Douro River," made in 1931.) And the story recycles and updates a never-completed project Mr. Oliveira worked on in the early 1950s. But whatever nostalgia might hover around this movie is subverted by its mischievous, inventive and entirely appropriate use of digital special effects. A modern ghost story requires such tools, after all, and Mr. Oliveira deploys them with an elegant and judicious hand. The coexistence of old and new ways of doing things is a motif that threads its way through this tale of unquenchable love and uncanny apparitions. The protagonist, a moody, faintly Dostoyevskyan intellectual named Isaac, is a professional photographer who develops his prints in a darkroom and hangs them from a clothesline strung across his room. He takes pictures of agricultural workers plying their trade with picks and hoes and singing songs that sound as primal as the labor itself. His unsentimental landlady wonders why he bothers with them, since nowadays everything is done 'with machines." Mr. Oliveira appreciates both points of view, which is only fitting since the art of cinema, as he practices it, seems at once ancient and modern. Isaac's contemplation of agrarian toil is disrupted by a rather archaic commission from a wealthy local family. A young woman named Angelica (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) has died, and her mother wants funerary portraits made. After a chilly welcome from the housekeeper and Angelica's sister, a nun, the photographer sets to work and is jolted by what seems to be a hallucination. As he looks at her through his viewfinder, Angelica smiles and opens her eyes, something that happens again to one of the prints hanging in his room. Soon Isaac is visited by her ghost and begins to believe that he has been transported to a realm of 'absolute love." The charm of 'The Strange Case of Angelica" lies in the way it balances this mysticism with a thoroughly secular sense of the business of everyday life. Not that any of the nonsupernatural occurrences that surround Isaac; the Greek-chorus chitchat among his landlady and her friends; the steady work in the fields and olive groves; the rise and fall of empires and economies; are exactly banal. The world as seen through Mr. Oliveira's lens is as fresh as if it had just been discovered and as thick with secrets as if it had always existed.

This product was added to our catalog on Monday 02 January, 2012.

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