A photographer, Isaac is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter Angélica. When he looks at her through the lens of his camera, she appears to come back to life just for him. He instantly falls in love with her. From that moment, he will be haunted by Angélica day and night.
L'Étrange affaire Angélica, El extraño caso de Angélica, L'Étrange Affaire Angélica, O Estranho Caso de Angélica, Lo strano caso di Angelica, Странният случай на Анджелика, 安吉里卡奇遇, Странный случай Анжелики, Dziwny przypadek Angeliki, 안젤리카의 이상한 사건, 安吉裏卡奇遇
France Cannes Film Festival 
USA FranceU France USA 
90
So definitively Late-Style that it could be utilized as an example in a text book. Manoel de Oliveira directed this when he was 102 years old (he lived to be 106!), so it's only fitting that it's a film less about a general fear or anxiety over death but instead offers a great excitement and beauty attached to the experience of it. This is a film that is liberated by death, thrilled by it. Fascinating parallels between the frozen image and reality. Photos, moving pictures, they each convey an afterlife that we cannot enter. One day, we all will lose access to the memories and moments we hold dear. But Manoel de Oliveira suggests that the sublime is waiting on the other side, just out the window into the open sky.
Came into this expecting a love story, but I found even more.
I saw a horror film about a photographer who hallucinates and dreams in motion pictures, and even more frightening: a film about non-time and non-being. It is the fright of a film chronotope that exists within a larger contemporaneous world and whose modernity is established in long shots of the city at night and day. The house of the photographer's landlady, the labor on the farm fields, and Angelica's family mansion are cocoons shielding from the sights (but not the sounds!) of a world of complex machinery, mobilization, and not to mention digitization. To be the main character in this film is to follow the lead of a…
Conceived a year after WWII, rewritten six years later and released almost six decades later, this is one of those instances where the title is far from misleading; it’s a damn fact. This is a very strange movie. A quirky, offbeat, pretty much silent film. Somewhere in the same vein as Kaurimaski and Andersson. We follow a photographer who gets to “bring to life” in ghostly form a bride. A bride that lets just say died very happy with a smile drawn in his face that, as to be expected, becomes much creepier and terrifying as the film goes on, namely those surreal dream sequences like when the photographer abandons his body and becomes a ghost…
to confront yourself with death so you can move beyond. haunted by the passage of time, between tradition and modernity, photography as a vain attempt to hold on to the instant, cinema as the deconstruction of that ilusion giving way to the spiritualized physiognomy of matter. the entire movie is balanced within this oxymoron of the tyrany and angelicalness of being. a monumental act of faith and despair.
It's crazy to think Oliveira, a film legend who made this at 101-years-old, could sustain such intrigue. Really have to catch some of his earlier movies because who amongst us could brag that they have worked from the silent era way into the digital one?
"Quando uma partícula encontra a correspondente na antipartícula, fundem-se num abraço que se transforma na sua mais pura essência. Energia!"
Angélica é dessas personagens que, assim como as Lauras de Preminger e Lynch ou a Rebecca de Hithcock, se fazem tão presentes justo por sua ausência. A moça, já sem vida e ostentando uma expressão de serenidade, pode ser vista em retratos dispostos lado a lado com fotografias de homens realizando trabalho braçal no que parece ser uma espécie de lavoura. A singeleza do semblante de uma bela mulher já falecida divide espaço com a fisicalidade de indivíduos que emprestam seu corpo ao trabalho debaixo do sol; a pureza do imaterial inevitavelmente contrasta com a brutalidade da matéria. Imagem é…
The actual strange case of Angelica is that this movie has only 6.4k logs.
Honestly, an amazing and underseen gem of a surreal romance and drama. This movie touches on a lot of themes: misunderstood artists, faith, and love. Each of those themes works in harmony with each other and helps to make the story move forward and help develop the characters.
The film starts really calm, with amazing photography, an amazing, relaxing score, and some pleasant vibes. Even when the character is forced to do something he doesn't want, it feels like his mood flows from one state to another, not feeling any pressure; the whole story actually "flows", and it's pretty easy to keep up with it.
This…
My first Manoel de Oliveira, and I was shocked that he made such a tour de force at the young age of 100! A true legend who was also underappreciated.
It's interesting to note that the idea for this film was first developed in the 1940s, but wasn't realized until the 21st century. In hindsight, this late addition to de Oliveira's career turns out to be timely—without the long delay, we wouldn't have the elements of nostalgia and retrospection that mark the greatest strengths of this seemingly simplistic love story.
"Old-fashioned work interests me," claims the protagonist, whose fascination with the pre-digital world wouldn't have had the same impact in a 1940s context. Dying for your art is no longer…
When a person turns 100 they should be given a million dollars to make a movie. Think of all the wisdom they could impart. Think how they could reckon with new technology, new ideas, a new world. Manoel de Oliveira kept making cinema through the change from silent to sound, b&w to colour, film to digital - with this film he allows us to feel the cumulative weight of these dramatic transitions with the lightest of touches. Like many of the great masters at the end of their careers, this is a filmmaker who has slowed down to appreciate all the beauty and mystery around them in their waning days. He reckons with a changing world and a changing medium,…
clipping through the bus seats asking random women with headphones on if they need a soulmate. if you simply knew the amount of places you’ve been that you will never go to again... you would be very mad
Beyond Life and Death...the still image obsolete in the face of the moving picture, cinema is the afterlife...simultaneously looking forward and back to find the present, as all great art must do...pulling from across a century of film and reminding me of the uncanny magic of the camera...the pan as transcendence in a world suspended and stagnant...a eulogy to an era and a celebration of the Unknowable
beautiful and terrifying
Ainda sobre a modernidade intrínseca do cinema e a serenidade dos filmes que permanecerão, aqueles que seguirão presentes.
2. When he returned in France, Cahiers was in the midst of its Maoist period, and Jean-Claude cautiously stayed away from these turbulences. He did not write again until after a certain "normalization" took place, and it's then, I think, that he made real progress in critical writing, comparable to that of Daney and Skorecki. In addition to the discovery of certain auteurs (e.g., Douglas Sirk), all three of them felt that cinephilic experience was about to change radically…
