“When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”
On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for a film. What could be more static than a princess asleep for a hundred years? It’s the kind of premise only Andy Warhol could cope with, finding a loopy majesty inside its tedium. But of course that ignores the tension inherent in the story — what’s really going on with the frozen girl? Is she sleeping, dreaming, or dead? Which in turn raises the problem of the prince: when you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?
The Strange Case of Angelica, Manoel de Oliveira’s parable about falling in love with a dead girl, is too well mannered to pursue the question quite that far. Actually, his film is too restrained and stifled by good taste to do more than skim the surface of its premise, but at least the premise is an intriguing one: a man falls in love with the photograph of a woman he took at her deathbed.
Those dream sequences have a touch of Méliès to them. Certainly there’s something fin-de-last-siècle about their combination of lo-fi special effects and coy sensuality. Angelica’s ghost wears an expression of pre-Raphaelite come-hitherness, to which Isaac responds with his best Young Werther. As a pair, they look like they should meet over a mist-fogged lake or wind-blasted moor. They aren’t the only part of the film that seems like it wandered in from the nineteenth century. Most of the other characters in Strange Case are pure types — the uppity maid, the rickety beggar, the nervous nun — but just when it seems that everyone in the movie is a refugee from the margins of a Victorian novel, a few walk-on boarders begin a conversation about anti-matter.
I hate to say it, but the strange mix of eras in The Strange Case of Angelica probably has something to do with Manoel de Oliveira’s age. One hundred and two years old, he began his career in the silent era and his lifespan coincides (almost) with the history of film. These facts always get brought up whenever he releases a new movie, usually to little profit, but here it has to be significant. For one thing, few other directors could have had a project on the backburner for sixty years, as is apparently the case with The Strange Case of Angelica. That long wait may explain some of the strangeness of the film’s setting, which seems perched between the 1950s (men’s hats, the Leica, antiquarian books) and the present (minivans). It also speaks to the conception of the film as a whole. Isaac, played by De Oliveira’s grandson, is a stand-in for the director. He’s in love with a photograph — as much with the girl in the picture as with photography in general, and by extension with the cinema as a photographic medium, an art form whose life is running out in tandem with his own.
A love story where the girl is a ghost and the ghost is cinema: if it worked, they’d screen it for Henri Langlois in heaven forever. But it doesn’t work: without any strong performances to anchor the action, the film is all mood — a mood captured in bare rooms, somber landscapes, and long drives in the rain. Like poor, translucent Angelica, the whole thing is a little too wan, and too wet, to fall in love with.
Anastasia (Carla Besnaïnou) begins the film as a tomboyish girl living a life of exquisite ease on a half-French half-Russian family estate that looks like it came out of Nabokov’s memoirs. She goes to sleep after pricking herself in the hand during a performance of what seems to be a French-language Mikado for kids. Her dream-world, which she enters after defeating an ogre at bowling, at first seems more prosaic than her real childhood. Dropped off by a phantom train at a cottage by a lonely railway crossing, she settles in with its inhabitants, a single mother and her teenage son. With her adoptive brother, Peter, she reads stories and explores the neighboring woods. Just hitting puberty, Peter is a perfect friend, solicitous and sweetly attentive – that is, until an ice crystal sent by the Snow Queen falls in his eye. He becomes instantly dissatisfied with his life and runs away. Anastasia runs off in pursuit. During her search, she penetrates a kingdom ruled by sweet-hungry albinos and is taken hostage by a band of gypsies led by an impetuous child queen; eventually, astride a harnessed deer, she makes it to furthest Lapland, where a shamaness tells her Peter’s whereabouts. Then, in an instant, she awakes as a teenager in the modern world (now played by Julia Artamonov), wearing a corset and living alone in a country estate.
The bulk of Sleeping Beauty takes place in Anastasia’s dreams, a fairly benign world by Breillat’s standard`s, although a few touches, like a knife stroking the neck of a deer every night so it learns to expect its fate, carry the charge of her darkest work. The final act is more troubling. Anastasia, suddenly awaking as an adolescent, is out of place in time and in her own body. As a child she was imperious and irresistible, in life and in her dream. She pursued Peter with an easy single-mindedness, as if he was a toy she had lost. In the present, she’s courted by Johan, his grandson and double. Confronted by adult desire, she’s stranded, almost helpless, and her initiation into sex is brutal, physically and as an assault on her illusions.