Vale Abraao
Portugal / France / Switzerland,
1993, 187 min
Shown in 1994
CREDITS
- dir
-
Manoel de Oliveira
- prod
-
Paulo Branco
- scr
-
Manoel de Oliveira
- cam
-
Mário Barroso
- editor
-
Manoel de Oliveira, Valerie Loiseleux
- cast
-
Leonor Silveira, Cecile Sanz de Alba, Luis Miguel Cintra, Rui de Carvalho
- source
-
The Public Theater
-
COMMENTS
Manoel de Oliveira received the Akira Kurosawa Award in 1994; he appeared in person.
OTHER
The exquisite, subtle cinema of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, this year’s Akira Kurosawa Award winner, has found a devoted audience appreciative of the passionate narratives that emerge from his painterly compositions and stylistic tableaux. Valley of Abraham, made as he approaches 85, is a rethinking of Madame Bovary, set in Portugal in the 20th century. De Oliveira’s Ema, like Flaubert’s heroine, marries without love, and takes a series of lovers drawn to her legendary beauty (when young, she caused car crashes merely by appearing on her veranda) but also frightened by it. 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, punctuated by conversations about love and the differences between the sexes. 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 de Oliveira suggests the human need for desire, even when unfulfilled. De Oliveira, known for his innovative adaptations of literary and dramatic texts, has created a riveting pleasure: the cinematic equivalent of the 19th-century novel, not through the illusionism of classic cinema, but rather through the stylized accumulation of visual and psychological detail that both reveal Ema and render her a mystery.
—Kathy Geritz
FACTOID #232
Our first seminar at the Festival was entitled Censorship and the Actor’s Art: A Symposium, featuring panelists Michael Mayer and Lou Greenspan at Grace Cathedral, October 24, 1966.
