Manoel de Oliveira's sensual and beautiful film “Val Abraham” is in theaters in a restored version

Portuguese Emma Bovary from the 1960s, beauty competes with irony in this masterpiece.

IIt is without a doubt with Francesca, One of the most beautiful films by Manoel de Oliveira, the master of Portuguese cinema. It was brought to life by Miguel Gomes last May in Cannes, where he won the Best Director Award for it. Grand Tour. Val Ibrahim It is an adaptation of a novel by the Lusitanian writer Agustina Bessa Lewis, which she revisits in a free and mischievous way. Madame Bovary In the context of Portugal in the 1960s.

resident The undulating Douro region, adorned with vineyards, Emma (Leonor Silveira) is here a bourgeois woman of impudent beauty, despite her limp. Married to a transparent doctor, she delights in sadness, takes lovers, and arouses the lust and praise of everyone with a phlegmatic inertia. “I am a state of mind that fluctuates” She whispers. The shots are hieratic settings, interior scenes where the characters discuss all sorts of topics, and not without a strong sense of self-importance on the part of the men, described with a very biting irony.

Behind and above them, Emma combines innocence and vice, freedom and captivity, by looking at herself in mirrors. She does not completely escape the mocking gaze either. Despite everything, it is her quiet and secret resistance as a woman that the film celebrates in a very sensual way, through her face, the landscape and the plants. The biblical roots are combined with sexual metaphors. A subtle play is also created between the dialogues and the voiceover, which complement each other and are not without provoking each other. The language whispers according to desire, the Moonlight Sonata. By Beethoven presents a haunting vibrator. Oliveira was 85 when he signed this masterpiece. The final scene, a magnificent tracking shot under the orange trees, is one of the most illuminating moments towards death.