One of the most essential films in Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira vast filmography, this dreamlike 1993 film posits Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into 20th century Portugal’s sun-drenched Douro valley.
Subtle, elegant, enigmatic, this movie by the veteran Oliveira exercises a powerful grip.
Abraham's Valley 1993
Vale Abraão
“The most accessible of Manoel de Oliveira’s work. Though over three hours long, the film’s strong storyline makes it as engrossing as a rich 19th century novel…
Certainly, one of the most cultured directors de Oliveira begins Abraham’s Valley with a Biblical citation linking its breathtaking northern Portuguese locations with Abraham’s exploitation of his wife Sarah’s body. The expectation that this is a film about female victimization is strengthened when the young heroine, Ema (Cecile Sanz De Alba), begins wistfully reading Madame Bovary. As a woman, she even marries a passive doctor (Luis Miguel Cintra) she doesn’t love and begins to have affairs.
But de Oliveira throws viewers a curve ball full of mischievous irony. The film’s great device is an off-screen narration, constantly commenting on the images and giving them a different slant. The narrator keeps busy advancing the plot and interjecting heavy bouts of psychological and social analyses… the effect is stimulating.
Uniformly stunning locations in the Portuguese countryside are rendered expressively by Mário Barroso’s silken cinematography, and the costumes and décor give the film a magical atemporal quality.” — Deborah Young, Variety