Abraham Valley = Vale Abraao

‘Abraham Valley’ is directed by Portuguese filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, who at 94, is a senior and prolific figure in contemporary world cinema. This film is adapted from a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luis that in turn adapts “Madame Bovary’ for a Portuguese audience. Running at 3 hours, ‘Abraham Valley’ spans the life of a woman, Ema Cardeano Paiva (played by Leonor Silveira), who is searching for fulfillment. At a young age, she is shown to possess powerful beauty that commands the attention of older men and causes car accidents in the local village. Living with her father and a handful of servants in a large mansion, her mother having passed away, Ema assumes the role of the matriarch or feminine ideal from an early age. She enters into a loveless marriage with the tepid, wealthy Carlo Paiva (played by Luis Miguel Cintra), and gives birth to two daughters, though continues to seek the interest of other men and to enter a series of affairs. ‘Abraham Valley’ presents a portrait of woman as refined and elegant, intelligent and sensitive, but as one who above all desires to be desired, as though this were a form of self-validation. Oliveria’s films generally transpire within lavish, refined and aristocratic surroundings and are ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ in the best sense: by being replete with detail in the dialogue and voice-over, they give texture and depth to the characters and their situations. This literary emphasis is one aspect of Oliveria’s style, which is detached, elegant, poetic and unsentimental. And so he can just as easily switch from glorious personal reverie to accidental death and capture all the emotion and irony of the latter in an inert object in the frame that his camera happens to fall upon. In Portuguese with English subtitles.