VALLEY OF ABRAHAM (38)

Directed by: Manoel de Oliveira (1993)

Starring: Leonor Silveira, Luis Miguel Cintra, Cecile Sanz de Alba

The Pitch: Trapped in a loveless marriage, a beautiful young woman starts to test her limits. And the viewer's patience.

Theo Sez: No doubt this must work better on the big screen - like many very long, very slow movies it casts a certain spell, but it's harder for it to take effect when you know you can break it at the touch of a button. On video, the response is closer to a kind of indignation - that a film can ask so much of our time and patience in return for so little : three hours-plus of clean, simple images, occasional placid beauty, "Clair de Lune" on the soundtrack and a stately, unvarying pace studded with echoes of "Madame Bovary" (the central couple called Ema and Carlos) and sometimes interesting conversations searching for a maddeningly elusive unifying theme. Some of the exchanges skirt close to self-parody ("We are two homogeneous couples." "What do you mean, marriage is not like a mayonnaise!"), but most of it is far from terrible, just monotonous and, at this length, vaguely depressing. Proof, if nothing else, that the deliberately humdrum style associated with Flaubertian "realism" doesn't work anywhere near as well in movies as it does on the printed page : then again, part of the problem is you can't even say with any certainty whether or not Flaubertian realism has anything to do with it. Inert, inscrutable and, yes, bewildering ; that it ends - after 187 minutes of waiting wearily for a punchline - with the observation that "nothing is important" is pretty much the final insult.