Plot

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. Young marries Dr. Carlo Paiva, who she is not attracted to, but is her father's friend. They move to the Valley of Abraham. Carlo loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room, to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. With time she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage so, with all the freedom she has, she takes a lover.—Michel Rudoy <mdrc@hp9000a1.uam.mx>

In the Douro Valley, Emma lives with her father and is brought up in an atmosphere of great poetic sensitivity. She becomes a beautiful and sensual woman with an irresistible taste for romantic fictions, who never manages to find complete satisfaction with men, from the moment she marries a doctor she has never loved. Following an intense social life, Emma will become involved with three men always in a constant search for passion, luxury, and challenges. Despite these three successive loves, their lovers cannot sustain a growing sense of disillusionment that leads her to define herself as nothing more than "a swinging state of soul.". Emma's beauty and provocative spirit will earn her the epithet of "Bovarinha", a modern Portuguese version of Flaubert's "Bovary". Finally, disillusioned and frustrated, Emma drowns in the Douro on a sunny day, after having dressed up as if she were going to a ball, without ever realizing whether it was an accident or suicide. "Abraham's Valley" is an adaptation to the cinema of the homonym work by writer Agustina Bessa-Luís, a literary exercise inspired by Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", which Manoel de Oliveira transforms into a beautiful and portentous film. Once again involved with Agustina's literary universe and, once more, building a story of frustrated love, a dominant theme in all her work, Oliveira signs a work of dazzling plastic beauty, of an amazing poetic sensibility and, at the same time, of a subtle and acid irony, narrating in an absolutely irresistible way the love story of a beautiful woman, victim of her incongruous desires and passions.