The Strange Case of Angelica: A trip through time from a 102-year-old director

A dead newlywed haunts a photographer in The Strange Case of Angelica.Handout

At 102, Manoel de Oliveira is the world's oldest working filmmaker, and it might be tempting to simply laud his latest film, The Strange Case of Angelica, for its very existence and have done with.

That, however, would be to patronize rather than review the film, an uneven but intriguing piece of whimsy that veers from powerfully symbolic cinematography into self parody.

In a boarding house in a Portuguese town, the photographer Isaac (Ricardo Trepa) is roused by his landlady (Adelaide Teixeira) to visit a wealthy family. Their newlywed daughter (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) has died and the grieving mother wants a few last mementoes of her child.

Taken into a dark house full of dour-faced servants and black-clad relatives, including a nun who is the deceased's sister, Isaac finds himself in front of a beautiful corpse displayed in wedding finery. When he raises his camera and looks at her through the viewfinder, she opens her eyes and smiles at him.

There begins a supernatural haunting - back in Isaac's room, Angelica smiles and moves in the photographs and appears to him in dreams - that ultimately drives the man mad.

The time period is ambiguous: Most of the characters are dressed as though it were the 1940s or 50s and Isaac's old camera is not digital, but the car in which he is transported is a nondescript contemporary van. Isaac shoots a group of workers swinging pickaxes in a vineyard because, he tells his landlady, he likes seeing things done the old way. She keeps insisting there are machines to do this work now, and at the end of the film a tractor does appear as though we were gradually moving forward in time.

That destabilizing setting is then tied to the film's supernatural themes in a scene where the boarding-house guests discuss anti-matter, the economic crisis and a looming environmental problem that could prove uncontrollable, hinting at scientific explanations for Angelica's presence and foreshadowing 21st-century problems. On the other hand, when more contemporary cars arrive, along with a group of schoolchildren in modern clothes, the effect becomes flaccid, as though the filmmaker simply couldn't be bothered keeping up the subtlety and has lumped for the easiest cars and clothing to source.

Similarly, humour is handled unevenly. There are moments here that are wonderfully macabre. When the landlady finds her pet bird dead in its cage, one guest nastily suggests it is because she has fed it hard-boiled egg. She retorts that, on the contrary, a curse has entered the house. The juxtaposition of the rational with the supernatural is witty. On the other hand, Angelica's appearances as a silvery ghost are so loopy, they undercut the film's surrealism. Meanwhile, the soundtrack of clacking heels, creaking doors and a Chopin sonata pounded out of the piano is an almost laughable cliché of the European art film.

The Strange Case of Angelica