Product Description

Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 02/25/2003 Run time: 105 minutes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17610 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2003-02-25
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 106 minutes

Amazon.com
While The Godfather was making moviegoers an offer they couldn't refuse, La Vallée was wowing art-house crowds with its flower-powered search for paradise in the jungles of New Guinea. It's there that an adventurous diplomat's wife (Bulle Ogier), hoping to find the forbidden feathers of a rare exotic bird, embarks on a deeper, more personal quest when she encounters a makeshift family of hippies seeking an unmapped valley from which visitors are said never to return. Like the structurally similar cult films from its era (including Walkabout and Aguirre: The Wrath of God), La Vallée dazzled the post-'60s subculture with free-spirited adventure and enigmatic beauty, captured here through the peerless lens of cinematographer Néstor Almendros. The hippie vibe seems mildly dated but its sensual context is timeless, and a climactic encounter with the primitive Mapuga tribe retains an intense cross-cultural mystique. Pink Floyd's celebrated soundtrack is mostly heard as background ambience, but it effectively enhances the film's compelling atmosphere of mystery and expectation. --Jeff Shannon

From the Back Cover
La Vallèe is not so much a slapstick farce, but rather a hypnotic journey into unknown territories: geographic, spiritual and sexual - capped off with a soundtrack by Pink Floyd. Ogier stars as the wife of an Australian diplomat slowly shedding her materialistic ways succumbing to physical and spiritual desires in the jungles of New Guinea where she accompanies a group of free-spirited adventure-seekers in search of a mythical valley. With a new digital transfer approved by Barbet Schroeder, La Vallèe is on DVD for the first time in its original wide screen aspect ratio.

Customer Reviews

Remembrance on DVD
I saw THE VALLEY (Obscured By Clouds) in a theater in the 70s, though probably not on its first-run engagement. What I remember is the imagry, not the music (in hindsight I'm startled Pink Floyd supplied the mostly subtle score), and an awe for the film and an appreciation for the night on walking out of the theater. I remember the ad campaign, but it was a word-of-mouth hit -- "You HAVE to see this movie!"

Much of the content is dated to its times, but a surprising portion is not. Remember, too, that the term "hippie" was itself getting dated in 1972, the pursuit of personal pleasures rising, as one bit of dialogue touches on.

The DVD transfer is imperfect, but artifacts are not obtrusive. Some of the editing is abrupt, again not detracting from the whole. The film is largely in French with some English and native New Guinean; English subtitles are available, but only accessible by pressing the Subtitles button on the player or remote.

As with most art-house films, THE VALLEY is aimed at an adult audience. Contained are full-frontal nudity (both genders), sex, and the frank killing and slaughter of three pigs, as well as themes of sensuality, monogamy, societal rigidity, and natural mood-altering substances.

the mountains and the valley beyond
Opening scene: Vivian, a diplomats wife, is browsing through the artifacts offered for sale in a grass hut in New Guinea. Vivian is seeking some rare feathers that fetch huge sums at Parisian Boutiques. She is a socialite and yet she is also very comfortable in the very earthy surroundings she finds herself in while her husband is away on business. At first hers seems only a casual curiousity but then in walks a tall blonde hippie stranger who has just returned from the interior with a cache of rare feathers -- after that it is not only feathers she is interested in but the tall blonde stranger as well.

Vivian catches a ride with the stranger and accompanies him back to his camp site. As soon as the two enter the tent they see a couple laying naked together. Vivian is surprised and yet also turned on by these very relaxed living conditions. The hippies live very close to the earth and they want to get even closer. In this very sensually open atmosphere the blonde stranger shows Vivian where they intend to go -- it is a place which has no name because it has never been charted as it is invisible from the sky as it is perpetually obscured by clouds. To the hippies this last unmarked place represents a last promise of paradise. Vivian is skeptical of such notions but she cannot resist the heady atmosphere of dreaminess and sensual freedom that this group represents to her and so she decides to leave her socialite existence for awhile and accompany them to La Vallee.

The story is very simple and Barbet Schroeder's style is almost documentary simple -- Schroeder produced some of the early new wave films but his own films are nothing like those early 1960's films. More and La Vallee do not draw attention to the director as the new wave films did, Schroeders films concentrate on the vagaries of character and what different experiences feels like. The Pink Floyd soundtrack does more than the dialogue in giving us access to what these characters are going through. Though they are united in their search for paradise, each character is also on a very private journey and the music accents both the shared and private aspects of this cross country quest.

One of the most memorable sequences is when the group spends the day with several tribes of New Guinea bushmen who have gathered to recognize their ancestors. Two of the hippies dress in tribal attire and paint themselves and dance along with the tribesman but two do not. Vivian herself does not adorn herself but merely watches the goings-on from a comfortable distance like a journalist while the tall blonde stranger feels a deep depression that he unlike the tribesman will never feel at one with nature. At another point Vivian too will attempt to merge with nature with the help of a hallucinogen but it is only a momentary union. And so the film is dreamy and yet also it is a kind of lament that certain dreams will never be more than dreams.

Along with the subtle but perfect mood music by Pink Floyd the cinematography is absolutely exquisite -- New Guinea has never looked so good.

I like both More and La Vallee equally well. And yes Michelangelo Antonio's Zabriskie Point is also very good and also features Pink Floyd as well as the Grateful Dead. I think Barbet Schroeder's films are much more organic though and so more pleasing to the instincts than Antonioni's film. Antonioni is very intellectual and even when he gets organic he arrives there by intellectual routes. Herzogs Aguirre is excellent and it is similar in that it is also a search for a mythic paradise but its vision of nature and man is much harsher. Theres a lyric magic in Barbet Schroeders films that simply does not exist anywhere else.

Schroeder's best
It is difficult to write a review of this film without mentioning the soundtrack for two reasons: one, the soundtrack is incredible, and two, it is more famous than the film itself. I'll get it out of the way by saying that Pink Floyd's music is fantastic, the soundtrack is sometimes better than the film (as was the case when they scored Schroeder's first film "More"), and it is worth owning more than La Vallee. Anyway...
Like most foreign (and non-Hollywood) films, this movie is very deliberately paced...if your favorite film is "2 Fast 2 Furious" or some other Hollywood pulp, this is not the movie for you. This is a film for those who watch Bergman, Fellini, and Kubrick, auteurs who make intelligent films at the expense of superficial action and wooden dialogue. La Vallee is a highly philosophical film, one that highlights the cultural divide between the West and the Third World (in this case, Papua New Guinea), and which therefore calls into question the very values of our society. The plot has been discussed before so I won't go over it again, except to say that it follows a woman's journey from one set of mores to another, and the changes she makes to gradually cast aside her values in favor of new ones. The two leaders of the group she joins in their quest for paradise represent two extremes of New Age thought...one a pessimist who believes that the two cultures will forever remain divided and estranged and that they will forever be plagued by the West, the other one who strives to immerse himself in a culture unspoilt by modern values and to cast aside the decadent West. A realist and a dreamer, some might say, but their two conflicting philosophies give balance to the film and force the viewer to draw their own conclusions as to what lies in the Valley and who is right.
We never see the Valley, although the characters do. Some have complained about this, but I think this ambiguous ending enhances the film. What the Valley is, and what is in it, is left to the individual to decide. The Valley is each person's paradise, and so could not be shown on film.
All things considered, a very good film. I recommend this over Barbet Schroeder's "More," which is not unique as this film is, far more dated in every aspect, and in which Pink Floyd's soundtrack really is better than the film. I also recommend buying Pink Floyd's soundtrack for both films (it is called "Obscured by Clouds" in the case of La Vallee).