Vale Abraão, 1993
[Abraham's Valley]
A
genial country doctor, Carlo Paiva (Luís Miguel Cintra)
strikes up a polite conversation with a privileged widower named
Paulino Cardeano (Ruy de Carvalho) at a dining hall and is immediately
captivated by the beguiling, almost forbidding presence of Cardeano's
mannered, but inscrutable adolescent daughter Ema (Cécile
Sanz de Alba). But Carlo is neither the first nor the only person
to be seduced by Ema's enigmatic countenance. Projecting a wide
eyed and intense, yet opaque gaze, Ema's seemingly fragile, yet
accessible beauty wields a potent, siren-like intoxication throughout
the idyllic plantation community, luring unsuspecting cyclists
and motorists ever closer to the intrespassable walls of the Cardeano
estate every time she steps out onto the veranda to the point where
the distracted commuters miscalculate the bend of the road and
crash into the wall upon executing a delayed, overcompensated turn
(then subsequently - and amusingly - plead, albeit in vain, to
the town officials to make Ema's presence on the elevated, private
terrace an enforceable traffic citation). It is perhaps this sinister
and unwittingly destructive impulse that seems to invariably surround
(if not, gravitate towards) Ema that causes Paulino to take heed
of his friends' advice during a dinner party to marry off his beautiful
daughter as early as possible in order to avoid such embarrassing
temptation. Years later, a suitable (though admittedly not ideal)
opportunity presents itself when Carlo and Ema (Leonor Silveira)
would again meet on a more somber occasion, as the recently widowed
physician is summoned to the Cardeano estate during the wake of
Ema's stern and pious aunt Augusta (Laura Soveral) in order to
attend to a mysteriously ailing servant named Branca (Dina Treno).
Carlo's attraction to Ema - deepened by his perception of mutual
understanding for each other's wounded vulnerability - results
in a polite, if dispassionate, courtship and marriage. Struggling
to adjust to married life, Ema, often left alone during Carlo's
all too frequent emergency house calls (a vocational inconvenience
that has also led Carlo to arrange for separate bedrooms), finds
her only solace in the silent, understanding gaze of her devoted,
deaf-mute housekeeper, Ritinha (Isabel Ruth). However, when Carlo's
sisters drive the proud Ritinha away with baseless allegations
of theft, Ema finds herself completely estranged from her former
life and betrayed by the emotional insensitivity of her diligent
and well-intentioned, but insensible husband.
Adapted from the novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, Abraham's Valley
is an elegantly realized, suffusively sensual, and understatedly haunting
portrait of idle privilege, objectification, isolation, and passion. Manoel
de Oliveira integrates his vocational rooting in the tradition of documentary
and neorealist filmmaking through lingering, contextual images of landscape
and milieu (most notably, in the images of viticulture and the agricultural
terraces of the valley) that reinforce the interrelationship between character
and environment with classicist aesthetics (particularly, literature and
theater) to create an inherently anachronistic tone that is both contemporary
and immediately relevant, yet tenaciously traditional and seemingly archaic:
extensive voice-overs that retain literal fidelity to the written novel;
static camera compositions (usually shot in long takes) that recall the
bounded canvas framing of an art painting; formally posed characters shot
in frontality that is commonly associated with (fourth wall) theatrical
direction as well as two-dimensional Byzantine iconography. Oliveira's
recurring motif of mirrors and visual reflections further illustrate, not
only the culturally perpetuated objectification of women into iconic images
(in which the definition of the ideal woman is set, but pliable, embodied,
not by the willful Ema, but by the uncomplaining Ritinha: dumb, servile,
handsome, and virginal), but also the film's overarching theme of surrogacy
and imitation. Note Ema's continued attraction to Vesuvio - a town named after
the volcano near the Bay of Naples in southern Italy - a place that, unlike
its volatile namesake, is cool and temperate and, like her fleeting affairs,
devoid of consuming intensity. In the end, it is this realization of the
insurmountable disparity between reality and imitation that allows Ema to
break free from the bounds of her superficial and vacuous existence - a sobered
acknowledgement, not of an exhausted struggle for the elusive, but the gullible,
accepted self-delusion of its facile, illusory attainment.
© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.
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On the overgrown grounds of an abandoned and dilapidated health resort ironically
called The Grand Hotel of Pezo on the outskirts of the Portuguese town, the aging
filmmaker, Manoel (Marcello Mastroianni) recounts a familiar tale by a Brazilian
author named Catulo Searence of a poet living in a hut overlooking the river who
would diligently till his land during the day and row his canoe across the river
at dusk to visit the woman he loved. As the story goes, one evening, the poet
rowed to the other side of the river in order to see his beloved only to find
her in the arms of another man and, as he returned home heartbroken, further
discovered that a landslide had, during his absence, washed away his hut and
his field, compelling him to express his resigned sentiment with the words,
"Saudade and the fallen land, a portion I dreamt of." The
conversation, which occurs midway through the film, evokes an earlier scene in
which Manoel and his traveling companions, actors Judite (Leonor Silveira),
Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier), and Duarte (Diogo Dória) discuss the
French-born Afonso's sentiment of saudade, a nostalgic yearning to
connect with his unknown (if not mystified) ancestral history in Portugal
that he has only known through his late father's colorful memories of his
early life in the insular, pastoral village from which he was eager to escape
in a quixotic search for adventure beyond the mountains (and into the throes
of the Spanish Civil War). It is a sense of profound, unrequited longing that
similarly haunts Manoel as the group travels through personally relevant places
and landmarks from his childhood that have been inalterably marked by time and
have since lost their significance in the contemporary. However, as the two figurative
searchers make their cultural pilgrimage through the land of their cherished
memories - one, rooted in a past that no longer exists, and the other, to a past
that had only existed in his dreams - their melancholic, personal journey becomes,
less a recognition of the physical than a cognition of the ephemeral.