Celebrated Portuguese
auteur and one of cinema’s greatest statesmen Manoel de Oliveira’s hypnotic, mystical,
ruminative, strangely oddball and fable-like penultimate film, The Strange Case of Angelica, was
conceived in 1946 and the initial script was written in 1952; and yet it was
finally made nearly 6 decades later, by which time the filmmaker was
astonishingly 102 years old. This imbued a quaint sense of anachronism into the
film and its protagonist, and a poignant sense of mortality too. Upon the
untimely and mysterious death of the young Catholic bride Angélica (Pilar López
de Ayala), a desperate hunt for a professional photographer on that rainy night
leads to the summoning of absent-minded dilettante Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa, the
director’s grandson) to get the job done. If the strangely tranquil look of the
ravishingly beautiful woman wasn’t enough, he finds her opening her eyes and
even smiling to him when he looks at her through his camera’s viewfinder. Consequently,
this lost and introverted guy, who stays alone in a boarding house and is
fascinated by outmoded subjects like men tilling the land manually to the
rhythm of deeply mournful tunes – much to the bewilderment of his caring landlady and the other boarders – finds himself increasingly infatuated with
the dead lady’s photograph. The spare narrative’s magic realism took an even
more entrancing turn when the phosphorescent ghost of the lady appears – either
in his dreams or in reality – and takes him on a transcendental ride through
the night sky, which intensifies his obsessive quest. Curious
mishmash of the old-fashioned and the modern, along with elements from silent era
cinema, delicately suffused the film with an atmosphere that was fantastical, nostalgic and
melancholic.
Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Genre: Drama/Magic Realism
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal
The canvases for Jia
Zhangke, chronicler of the China’s incessant sociopolitical transitions, are
usually at once grand and intimate, and that holds true for Mountains May Depart too. However, the final
segment in this episodic film was a departure as it focused on the diaspora
population, and that made it bit of a mixed bag by his stellar standards –
compelling and poignant for two-thirds, but tad stilted in the end. The fist
chapter, set in the dreary coal mining town of Fenyang in the Shanxi province
in 1999 – as Hong Kong is on the verge of changing hands – and shot in the flat
aspect ratio of 1..33:1, portrayed a love triangle involving Tao (Zhao Tao) who
has a layered friendship with soft-spoken coal mine worker Liangzi (Liang
Jingdong), and the brash businessman Jingsheng (Zhang Yi) who starts pursuing
her aggressively. In the second episode, set in 2014 and shot in widescreen
ratio of 1.87:1, Tao is now a successful businesswoman whose life gets shaken by
two developments – the return after many years of a severely ill and
impoverished Liangzi; and a brief visit by her 7-year old son Dollar, from her broken
marriage to Jingsheng, for her father’s funeral. The final chapter, set in
Sydney in 2025 and shot in ultra widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, Dollar, who’s now an
estranged young guy with faded memories of his mother, starts a Freudian affair
with his middle-aged professor (Sylvia Chang). Tao was magnificent in the first
two chapters which were laced with loneliness and melancholy, while Jia made
lovely use of the disco track Go West,
especially in the magical and heartwarming final shot where it plays to Tao’s impromptu
solitary jig.
Director: Jia Zhangke
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Family Drama
Language: Mandarin
Country: China
