The Strange Case of Angelica
Genre: Foreign language
Director: Manoel de Oliveira Stars: Ricardo Trepa, Pilar Lopez de Ayala
Rating: ****1/2
There’s a temptation to see every new film by the 102-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira as a valedictory work, but The Strange Case of Angelica really does feel like an artist having a reckoning with his chosen medium. This is a story of a young photographer (Ricardo Trepa) who becomes smitten with the exquisite corpse he’s assigned to immortalize on film — and who then comes alive within the space of his camera’s aperture — and is a plangent, enchanted metaphor for the love of cinema.
