De Oliveira: O Estranho Caso de Angélica (The Strange Case of Angélica) (2010)

This strange, beautiful film is about a young photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trepa), who’s called to the deathbed of a young woman, Angélica (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), to perform a postmortem photograph. After returning home, he finds himself haunted by her image and spirit, and starts roaming his small Portugese town in search of some trace of her presence, some sign that she hasn’t entirely departed this world. As befits a film about photography, it’s largely composed of long takes, with very few close-ups and no camera movement, full of details that hold your attention for a long time. Among other things, that suffuses every mise-en-scene with the hush of a deathbed – but it’s a magical, devout hush, the aura of a room where the spirit’s just left the body and is still hovering, beneficent, somewhere nearby. In that sense, the film’s shot more from Angélica’s perspective than from Isaac’s, as de Oliveira imagines how it might feel to hover, watching, in those first minutes, hours and days, conjuring up the deep quietness of a world in which you’ve suddenly become invisible. And in making you feel the deep quietness of being invisible, it simultaneously makes you realise how provisional your invisibility usually is when it comes to films – although, in most films, there’s no doubt that the characters can’t see us, there’s also no doubt that, if we were actually there, they could. Here, that’s not necessarily the case, making for something estranging and melancholy about life just continuing as usual, the way neorealism undercuts magical realism. At one point, Isaac wanders into a discussion of antimatter, and the film often plays out as a vision of the matter from the world of antimatter, a vision of the material world from the realm of the immaterial. Perhaps that’s why de Oliveria’s silence is so pregnant, so potent – at 101 years of age, he’s not only old enough to remember when cinema was still an offshoot of photography, but he’s perhaps the only director who’s worked in both silent and digital cinema. And the film uses digital cinema to renew the extraordinary, uncanny immediacy of silent cinema – when we first see Angélica, she’s so close to life that it’s impossible to believe in the finality of death, much like watching this beautiful, paradoxical memento mori.