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

Manoel de Oliveira — Vale Abraão (Abraham's Valley / Val Abraham) - 1993
DVDrip | Portuguese | Subtitles: ENG & FR (optional) | 3:22:55 | 704x400 | H264 | PAL 25fps | Audio: MP3 - 160kbps | 2.15 GB

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


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