Abraham's Valley

Manoel de Oliveira made films for eighty years and directed his last at a hundred and six. Abraham's Valley, made when he was eighty-four, is generally held to be the finest work of his extraordinary late period. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1993 in a three-hour cut and was Portugal's Oscar submission that year.

Agustina Bessa-Luís wrote the source novel at Oliveira's suggestion, as a Portuguese transposition of Madame Bovary. Ema, played first by Cécile Sanz de Alba and then by Leonor Silveira, grows up in the Douro wine country, is married to a doctor across the river, and becomes locally famous for a beauty that stops traffic on the road below the house. Oliveira films it in long static compositions with a third-person narrator reading great slabs of the novel over the top, so that the film keeps announcing itself as literature being adapted rather than pretending otherwise.

That device is the point. Oliveira is not dramatising Flaubert; he is examining what happens when a woman's life is lived inside a story everyone around her has already read. The Douro landscape, shot across the seasons, does as much work as the actors. It is slow, formal and, once its rhythm takes, completely absorbing — the best entry point into the work of a director whose career spanned the entire history of the medium.