Love in the Time of Cholera

JUSTICE DENIED

In the 2015 documentary Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera is addressed by the author, saying it’s about his parents and then adds the caveat that reading the novel is “dangerous because it’s a love story with a happy ending...You have to be careful not to fall into my trap.” Just what the movie version by director Mike Newell and adapter Ronald Harwood did; they turned García Márquez into something “digestible for a general audience,” so says one of the movie’s thirteen producers. Navigating the saga of creepy lovesickness as a safely literal romantic voyage, accepting the conclusion the novel is generally agreed to be the most accessible of his works, it’s therefore transparent. Not at all baffling to traverse, the book, packed with his customarily heavy load of gossipy detail, is trap-loaded with Márquezian tropes, philosophic as well as corruptive mazes and sorcerous imagery. When the journey to love is over in the movie, the first questions readers ask: Where’s Gabo’s magic? Why isn’t the parrot wisecracking back at the doctor or mimicking French and religious gospel? Where’s the anonymously sent black doll growing out of its dress and shoes during the night while in Fermina’s bed? The at-the-foot-of-the-bed apparitions? The masturbating monkey and a four meter anaconda slithering through the house at night eating or frightening away unwanted pests? Hinting at some of these isn’t delivering them. To have to ask these questions about the movie from a director who made Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire could and in fact did outrage movie critics and many lovers of the book. Readers end up feeling about Newell what many of us came close to feeling about Bille August with his stripped down version of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits—their Euro-WASP practicalities seem out of emotional sync with Latin literature laced with wizardry, except August, providing at least a minimum of surreal continuity, has a genuine love for Allende. We’re not sure what’s real to Newell and his crew as they pump out press releases about what they’re supposed to feel as opposed to what they didn’t achieve on screen. Viewers also know what has additionally undermined the endeavor—under-evaluating the benefits of rigorous testing of makeup. For Newell, who has to cover half a century in 138 minutes, the grade isn’t even satisfactory; with a production estimated at $50 million dollars, there’s no way to accept Benjamin Bratt’s Doctor Urbino is 81 years old or Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Fermina is in her seventies. (Okay, her body.) With Bratt’s uncommon Peruvian-Germanic handsomeness staying unaltered, we’re alarmed by the greas(y)paint cosmetics, and likewise dismayed over Mezzogiorno appearing in gray curlicue wigs and wrinkles suggesting a failed Lifestyle lift. When Javier Bardem transitions to replace Unax Ugalde’s younger version of Florentino, we’re initially startled by the resemblance, and it is the movie’s single magical moment. Soon, however, Bardem suffers—and makes us suffer—those wimpy period hairdos and a sticky-looking barber shop mustache repulsive in close-up, sparking a renewed appreciation for Jeremy Irons’ ageing process in House of the Spirits. If Harry Potter fans would never tolerate inexcusably lousy FX, why should an audience for one of the world’s greatest writers tolerate all this lousiness?

Beyond appearances, the three principals are hindered by what’s missing in their characters. Bratt’s fastidious doctor in the novel leans authoritarian—he hasn’t any tolerance for dogs who don’t talk—but justly esteemed for his social and medical undertakings; in the film he’s made charming and kinder in his peculiar foreignness accentuated in black, tan and white top hats needing their social status height fractionally reduced, though still necessitating his wife spy on him to confirm his philandering. Because there isn’t a firmly established relationship between the doctor and his renowned bird (its linguistic tricks a popular tourist attraction in the unnamed Columbian city in the book, and as important spiritually as Allende’s Barrabás), the accident used to segue into the story will come to lack its tragicomic punch—the mythology encircling birds perched to see the Fall of Man—when he’s later acknowledged dead as a brief afterthought. Therein lies the difficulty in believing anything about the story, as the movie is this succession of impassive and unrealized moments in which the actors aren’t convincingly connecting and making matters worse is they’re speaking in so low a voice we’re regularly turning up the volume. Too often Mezzogiorno blanks out in mind as she hasn’t a strong retentive image (other than her nudity) to be the central love object, allowing the audience time to glimpse a bit of Debra Winger in youth, a bit of Mélanie Laurent in the middle, a reserved bit of Rachel Ward in the later years. (She can do nervousness and frigidity—especially against daddy John Leguizamo, who’s really bad in the David Carradine-Warren Oates tradition.) Deficiencies extend to Florentino’s multiple trespass: in the adaptation’s whitewashing, he appears too duncy a crybaby to be a serial rake—an undercurrent throughout the book—and when finally hobbling forward to profess unrequited love for Fermina, he evokes the Marx brothers in unison sounding like Anthony Quinn. A diseased-by-love stalker, his unaccountable sex life—self-documented and reaching a conquest count of 623 women—is replete with incredulous moments of pedophilic seduction, hushed-up rape and unwanted pregnancy, murder (by a jealous husband), suicide and, under an arranged quarantine, a hapless 50 years in the making culmination as reward for love’s labor. We’re perplexed by what any woman out of those hundreds sees in him; was there a dearth of charismatic machos in the time of cholera engendering desperation? Unceasingly death-wishing his rival the doctor, he’s the clandestine scoundrel the rag Justice should be eager to expose, as would a Latin director with fearless feelers. This Love in the Time of Cholera gets the British prescript, the opposite of the supernaturally charged atmosphere of the great Latin American magician of paronomasia that readers have been longing to see, though via Affonso Beato’s cinematography it’s the best-looking Teatro Obra Maestra Latina of his works filmed thus far and the most gentlemanly. Semana, a Bogota-based left wing news weekly, reported that the beloved conjurer, also one of its contributors, responded with a smiling “Bravo!” to the movie. Likely meaning he got a few points of the gross. Oh, the traps the fox set!

In March, 2019, Netflix announced the purchase of the rights to produce a miniseries based on García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. No timetable, and no director or adapter selected, but the author’s two sons, who will act as producers, have stipulated, as part of the deal, the presentation will be in Español and filmed in Columbia. This hopeful news is one of the beneficial sideffects of Roma, so its director Alfonso Cuarón might be assumed to have the inside track for the plum assignment. No doubt Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu are also licking their chops.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com