He has surely been a beneficiary of ageist celebrity-glamour as surely as a twentysomething wunderkind. But it's been difficult to look at him any other way; de Oliveira is the only authentic Portugese auteur anyone can name, a lone man standing in a Euro-culture robbed of a proper New Wave. Having been devastated by a lengthy dictatorship and the persistent demons of late colonialism like no other Western European nation, Portugal has proven lately to be fertile soil for generational anomie and disaffected realism, as seen in the thorny, desolate films of Pedro Costa, Tessa Villaverde and Manuela Viegas. But de Oliveira has not become famous and beloved because of his Portugese-ness; in fact, his late-stage blossoming is European Market-bound, with an eagerness to use French, Italian and American stars, and screenplays written in French. He has become his own industry. Likewise, his films have taken on a stiff, hushed, theatrical air, unhurried and unconcerned with progression. For the initiates, a de Oliveira film is a call to meditation, elderly in its pacing and contemplative of mood.
Angelica certainly resounds with the filmmaker's signature tone - it's often framed like a creche, and moves with the deliberation of an old codger telling a war story. The story told, however, is the most gossamer of movie-age fairy tales: a young early-century photographer (Ricardo Trepa) living in a Lisbon boardinghouse is summoned by a wealthy estate in the middle of the night to take the portrait of a dead girl, lying in state. But when he gazes through his viewfinder, she comes alive and smiles, and to him his film captures her that way, too. He becomes haunted by her, but because the two of them are instantly, retroactively in love, as she appears to him as a glowing phantom and takes him for night flights over the rooftops of the ancient city. Seemingly overcome with charming whimsey, de Oliveira nevertheless maintains his stately approach; his compositions are simple and his shots are held for minutes longer than any other filmmaker would dare. (He thinks, perhaps, he has earned the right to dally.) Trepa's stunned and vacant photog wanders the Portuguese landscape, interfacing with vineyard laborers and beggars and the prickly residents of his boardinghouse, who do not like his odd, dreamy behavior any more than they like him being a Jew. He continues taking pictures, dissatisfied that everything else around him doesn't come more fiercely to life through his lens. It's clear that normal, "alive" life has lost its meaning for him, and the film's minor-key dramatics derive from the frustrations and lostness that comes from this realization. Naturally, since this is a fable, death eventually wins out, but as in Peter Ibbetson (1935), Wuthering Heights (1939), et al., long before it, love conquers all.
It's an eccentric and purposefully naive movie, with double-exposure spectral F/X that would've seemed at home in the '30s (or even, in some aspects, the early-century fantasies of Georges Melies). But there's no missing the wistful subtext here, the idea that life seen through a lens and captured on film can seem, maybe tragically, more potent and vivacious than it really is, and that cinema may in fact be a transcendence, a means to escape the finality of death. De Oliveira is just doodling, of course, fooling around with the film image as a slippage between the physical and spiritual worlds, but the film comes off as outrageously elegiac. But everything he's done for 20 years has the unmistakable tincture of elegy and eulogy to it (the man passed his 103rd birthday this past December 11), as if he's been conscientiously building cinema's most elaborate self-memorial, and hadn't, in fact, found his true subject until he'd lived for 80 years or more.
The Cinema Guild DVD release of Angelica comes loaded with the best kind of supplements - more films, including de Oliveira's very first film, the silent short doc Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) and Paulo Rocha's 1992 documentary Oliveira L'Architecte, plus critic commentaries, interviews, and essays, a brace of context more befitting the filmmaker's life and persistence than the movie's individual flightiness.
For more information about The Strange Case of Angelica, visit Cinema Guild.
by Michael Atkinson
