JUSTICE DENIED 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. As of 10/8/2024, the streaming service announced the first part of the ambitious project will premiere December 11, 2024. Details will follow when more information is released. If you have the service, you can see a brief if mysterious ad. Text COPYRIGHT © 2009 RALPH BENNER (Revised 10/2024) All Rights Reserved. |