Manoel de Oliveira — Vale Abraão (Abraham's Valley / Val Abraham) - 1993

Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira celebrates his 100th birthday this month. This centenarian, who has been making movies since 1931 and is little known in this country, is still one of the most vital and unorthodox artists working in the world today. In 1993, at the age of 85, de Oliveira directed what a number of European critics describe as his chef-d'oeuvre: "Valley of Abraham" ("Vale Abraao"), a contemporary variation on Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," inspired by Agustina Bessa-Luis's Portuguese novel also titled "Valley of Abraham."


"Abraham's Valley" may be the most extraordinary achievement for Portuguese cinema, and puts Manoel de Oliveira on a level with the world's greatest directors who were equally able to create an unmistakably personal style on their exploration of the human condition. I agree with the first commentator that one cannot speak of an adaptation of Flaubert's novel, but it should also be pointed out that de Oliveira – maybe comparable to Robert Bresson's film versions of Dostoyevsky – conveys the theme into his very own perception of the world, and leaves behind the source in his search for the profound depths of it to create something likewise outstanding, like only a true genius can. The rigid and formal aestheticism which de Oliveira had been developing in more than 60 years as a filmmaker transcends into a perfect composition, which owns a lot to the original marvel of static shots in early silent cinema and the eclectic rigours of Dreyer and Straub/Huillet, so that the few times the camera actually moves it creates an amazing effect on the viewer. The antique decoration as well as spellbinding landscapes of the Portuguese valley reshape the baroque feeling of "Abraham's Valley", a film which is guided by an omniscient voice over but nonetheless always centering around the stunning beauty of main actress Leonor Silveira. Alongside Béla Tarr's "Sátántangó" and Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day" this might be the greatest masterpiece of the 90s, but since the critical world still doesn't seem to be willing to give credit to Portuguese films which doesn't star international actors one might just be lucky to catch this film during a retrospective in some hidden cinematheque. – Marc from Buenos Aires, IMDB review



Abraham’s Valley is a rethinking of Madame Bovary, set in Portugal in the twentieth century. Oliveira’s Ema, like Flaubert’s heroine, marries without love, and takes a series of lovers drawn to and frightened by her legendary beauty. Ema’s own yearnings, revealed by a knowing narrator, are intense but imprecise: she desires primarily to be desired. Her longings lead her toward an ever more constricted existence. The narrator takes us beneath the lush surface of reality to suggest the tragedy of Ema’s isolation and thwarted dreams. Her “doomed love” is the inevitable result of her romanticism, yet Oliveira suggests the human need for desire, even when unfulfilled. Oliveira has created the cinematic equivalent of the nineteenth-century novel, not through the illusionism of classic cinema, but rather through the stylized accumulation of visual and psychological detail that both reveals Ema and renders her a mystery. – Kathy Geritz, BAM/PFA





At the age of 85, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who has been making movies since 1931 and is still little known in this country, has brought forth what a number of European critics describe as his chef-d'oeuvre: "Valley of Abraham" ("Vale Abraao"), a contemporary variation on Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," inspired by Agustina Bessa-Luis's Portuguese novel also titled "Valley of Abraham." The film is a grand, singularly idiosyncratic work, as austere as Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" and as thick with narrative details and chatty asides as "Little Dorrit." It mesmerizes, sometimes maddens and tests the emotional and physical reflexes. In this case, citing the film maker's age is not impertinent. In "Valley of Abraham" Mr. de Oliveira exhibits an Olympian confidence that comes only after having lived, worked, thought and considered for a very long time. He has achieved a freedom denied others. He can break conventions and make his own rules. What's the worst that can happen to him? Be denied a long-term contract with Disney? More important, Mr. de Oliveira represents a kind of sensibility that today has all but disappeared. Like Luis Bunuel, he is a man shaped by the 19th century, working in a 20th-century art form to which he brings a richly hybrid point of view. Even as he exploits the possibilities of the camera to record the mysterious surfaces of things, he evokes the power of words both to clarify and contradict. His films invite a kind of speculation rare in cinema as this century's end approaches. (…)





(…) Mr. de Oliveira's heroine is almost the antithesis of Emma Bovary, the foolish, vain, deluded French provincial who reads silly magazines and books and lives her life accordingly, with fatal results. Flaubert appreciated Emma's situation, but he wasted no sympathy on her. He dismembered her with care. Mr. de Oliveira adores his Ema Cardeano. For all her failings, few of which we actually see, she is an idealized woman, her nature too finely tuned and poetic for this world, where she is surrounded by men who are moral and spiritual midgets. To the disgust of her devout, unmarried aunt, who spends hours each day on her knees praying to Jesus, Ema reads novels, but good ones, including "Madame Bovary." When first seen by Carlos de Paina, a much older, married, well-to-do doctor and gentleman farmer, Ema is a 14-year-old beauty, dining on eels in a restaurant in the provinces with her father. Carlos is dazzled by the girl who, at that first meeting, notes "his nice neat salesman teeth" but is otherwise unimpressed. He's not an exciting man. A few years later, after being widowed, Carlos meets Ema again when her father calls him in for a consultation. In terms of screen time, marriage follows quickly. The marriage's inevitable disaster takes much, much longer. Infusing the film with its particular tone is the soundtrack narration spoken by the omniscient tale-teller. Not since "Diary of a Country Priest," and maybe Francois Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," has narration been used for such curious and exhilarating effect. In the film's opening sequence, before Ema has been introduced, the narrator is already leaping ahead of himself to tell us how Carlos sometimes introduced his second wife as his sister, "which made things easier when men fancied her." (…)





(…) The narrator is given to contemplative thoughts and lyrical interpretations, but he also has the manner of a brilliant busybody. He tells us everything and, from time to time, nothing: one can't always be sure whether his observations are sometimes intentionally allusive or just vague because the English subtitles are inadequate. Most of the time the narration works extremely well, even as the narrator tells us things we do not see. He reads the thoughts of two frostily aristocratic old ladies when they meet young Ema for the first time. One of them describes her beauty as "sinister." The other says it has "a kind of genius to it." These aren't observations one often encounters in movies. They wouldn't easily fit into dialogue but, as voice-over narration, they give emotional presence to Mr. de Oliveira's obsession with his subject. Ema is played by Cecile Sanz De Alba as a girl and Leonor Silveira as a woman, both of whom are pretty but not immediately hypnotizing. The fully written narration supplements images of startling clarity and simplicity. The director shares Bunuel's preference for the functional camera movement and the uncluttered film frame, which, if there had been feature films 100 years ago, one might call a 19th-century film style. "Valley of Abraham" proceeds leisurely at the pace of the narrator. Mr. de Oliveira's Ema, unlike Flaubert's, has a limp that the narrator describes as "slight," though it looks pronounced to us. He remarks that Satan is also supposed to have a limp, which some people think is a warning to would-be victims. As a young woman Ema has a fondness for showing herself on her father's veranda, just above a sharp turn in the highway leading into town. Car and after car goes smash into a stone wall as their drivers become bewitched. The mayor officially labels her a road hazard. (…)





(…) The manner in which the young Ema fingers the blossom of a blood-red rose suggests that nothing good is going to come of her. Yet Ema seems a very passive femme fatale. She takes lovers, but the narrator tells us her lust was "imaginary." She simply wanted men to desire her. It is Mr. de Oliveira's method that by the end of the film she has become as beautiful as she is supposed to be, and even more of a mystery than she is at the beginning. The film has wit. Mr. de Oliveira's version of Flaubert's grand ball, which excites Emma Bovary's romantic ambitions, is a party that looks upper-middle-class exurban, attended by men who golf and women who garden. Society is scaled down in "Valley of Abraham," but not Ema's confused aspirations. The director's fondness for women in general, and not just Ema, is apparent in the fact that all of the women's roles are more interesting, and more vividly played, than the men's. His actors look and behave like hand-me-downs from a not-great repertory company. The film also has its version of Ema's limp: Mr. de Oliveira's decision to score Ema's romanticism with relentless repetitions of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and Debussy's "Clair de Lune" on the soundtrack. There can be no greater praise for this spectacular and eccentric film than to report that "Valley of Abraham" never gets buried under the overload of marshmallow din. – Vincent Canby, New-York Times









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