48th NYFF 2010: Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica

102 year-old Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica is this year’s 36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup, which was hopefully only selected as a sentimental choice by the NYF. Neither of these are the best efforts of Jacques Rivette or de Oliveira and curiously both films actually have similar tones. They’re rather whimsical and feature some kind of magical realism. They’re extremely sentimental love stories.

Strange Case is a fable like story of Isaac, a photographer and flaneur type, having his life changed after being assigned to photograph the dead body of Angelica, a twenty something beauty from a large, wealthy family. She comes alive to him through his lens, and later in his photographs. He has visions of them flying around the city together as spirits. More hijinks. Eventually, he chooses to be with her rather than remain in his corporeal form. None of this is terribly exciting.

It’s a case of an obvious allegory, but to nothing really too revelatory. The obvious question, done over and over again at this point, all during de Oliviera’s lifetime, is of whether or not Isaac’s visions of Angelica are real. Well, they don’t really matter, it’s more about the feeling, his finding true love, etc. It’s OK in some stories for us to not care about that question, but just the character and his/her journey (i.e. Blow-Up, as this film has been often compared to already), however, here we neither care about the external nor the internal conflict. At least I didn’t. Side-note: oddly the film is labeled as the title that should have competed in Cannes’ Main Competition, and not the Un Certain Regard section.