Abraham’s Valley

Abraham’s Valley – I am familiar with the great Manuel de Oliveira through pictures like A Talking Picture, The Strange Story of Angelica, Journey to the beginning of the World, and Belle Toujours. These are all short films, most of them about 80 minutes in length – they are mysterious and superb, somehow they manage to be, at once, highly compressed and strangely digressive and leisurely. Abraham’s Valley (1993) made when then now centenarian director was a youthful 85 is huge, elaborate and very long – it runs more than three hours. As far as I can determine, the film seems to be a philosophical meditation about female beauty – is beauty a blessing or some kind of malign curse? Some critics claim that the film is a Portuguese retelling of Madame Bovary – this is wrong, Flaubert’s book is merely one of the works cited in picture and, although it provides some of the film’s framework, the reference is more an allusion than a structural device. Ema, the heroine, is so fantastically beautiful that ,at 14, that when she appears on the terrace at her house she causes serious car accidents – the local city fathers pass an ordinance banning her from standing near the roadway. Later, she marries rather arbitrarily – her husband, like Emma Bovary’s spouse, is a small-town doctor who is frequently engaged on house-calls. Ema undertakes some desultory affairs and dies when she slips through a couple of rotted planks on a pier near Abraham’s Valley, a remote glen where she seems to have access to a secluded house. The film is baffling and deserves study. On first viewing, parts of the picture although very lucidly staged and framed are obscure to me. The actress playing Ema, Leonore Silveira, gives an extraordinary performance – she embodies the elusive nature of true female beauty, not the stuff we see in magazine ads, the real undiluted thing – somehow, she looks different every time we see her: sometimes, she is seductive, other times, her features look haggard, even brutish, at times, her beauty takes on a “sinister” edge as one of the characters notes. In one scene, in which she smokes a cigarette while unsuccessfully attempting to seduce a man, Silveira’s appearance is so siren-like and enthralling as to be positively frightening. The action takes place in a narrow river valley, often shot from high bluff tops, a gorge that is apparently some part of the Douro where the a dam has impounded the river to make deep, greenish lakes between precipitous slopes shaggy with vineyards. (It is the same landscape that de Oliveira shows in The Strange Story of Angelica and, in both films, the scenery is as important as the characters.) A resonant voice-over provides an elaborate and abstract narration that is ubiquitous and rather difficult to follow – the film is dubbed into French from its original Portuguese and some viewers have said that the subtitles are badly botched. Like Godard films of the same period, the experience of watching the film is an overload of information – characters speak in elaborate riddles or engage in arias of abstract discourse (there is a digression on love and opera for instance) and this is interspersed with equally abstract and philosophical narration. The images are exceedingly beautiful, if tranquil and mostly static. Like Nabokov’s Ada or John Banville’s The Infinities, the characters act and speak as if they have walked out of a nineteenth century Victorian novel – and, yet, we see them riding motorcycles and speedboats. This is one of the endearing aspects of all de Oliveira’s pictures – his characters behave with the stately courtesy of figures in a book by Henry James, but they obviously live in our world and are somehow our contemporaries (although they don’t seem to have cell-phones or computers). Abraham’s Valley is said to Manuel de Oliveira’s magnum opus and obviously requires careful watching and analysis. But I don’t own the film and the DVD version now available is apparently defective in aspect ratio, transfer, sound quality, and subtitling (although I thought it extremely beautiful even in the version that I watched) and so I will have to wait the release of this picture in a better format so that I can buy the movie and analyze it at my leisure.