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Hardly novel

Another dull reading of Márquez
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 16th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Makeup! Javier Bardem and Giovanna Mezzogiorno are Max Factored to death.
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Love in the Time of Cholera

Directed by Mike Newell
With Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo, Fernanda Montenegro and Liev Schreiber

In my first years of university we all carried copies of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; some were actually reading it. The term magic realism had not quite deteriorated into critical cliché, and so still possessed enough cachet to sequin one’s coffeehouse conversations with (though Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and that other great undergrad shibboleth, “semiotics,” would soon make short shrift of that).
In this Starbucks-less and grungeless Seattle of the mid-’80s, there would occasionally erupt very singular film fads, where certain foreign films would be embraced by the public and enjoy longer runs in the Emerald City than anywhere else in the world, such as Margarethe von Trotta’s Heller Wahn (Sheer Madness) and Kohei Oguri’s Muddy River. Another film that we flocked to (mindful to be seen posing with our uncracked paperbacks of Solitude) was Ruy Guerra’s film of Márquez’s story Erendira.
The film was a phantasmagorical feast; I still have vivid memories of the great Irene Papas’ monstrously energetic performance as the mother figure. Having endlessly lectured each other on the topic of magic realism, it was startling to actually see it in action.
By my next encounter with a film version of a Márquez tale I was a bit more prepared, and very much more disappointed. Francesco Rosi’s 1987 adaptation of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, with its minor performances from Anthony Delon, Ornella Muti and a dubbed Rupert Everett, was like watching paint dry. Lush as equatorial foliage, it also successfully managed to recreate the torpor of the tropics inside the cinema.
Next to Mike Newell’s new version of Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, however, Rosi’s film suddenly seems dazzling by comparison. Where Rosi’s film was simply, implacably dull, Newell’s Cholera is laughably turgid, with much aiding and abetting from Ronald Harwood’s wooden script.
The cholera of Márquez’s title is really love, that most exquisite of diseases. In late 19th-century Colombia, in a city much like the author’s native Cartegena, a young man, Florentino Ariza, falls in love with a wealthy man’s daughter, Fermina Daza.
Hailing from different classes, their budding romance is difficult to conduct, and so their love for each other is confined to letters. But when this epistolary affair is found out, Fermina’s father takes her away from the city and from Florentino.
The pair will pine and secretly continue their correspondence. But when Fermina finally returns to the city and accidentally runs into Florentino, she suddenly realizes that her love for him was simply youthful illusion. She will go on to marry the wealthy Juvenal Urbino, while a depressed Florentino will eventually discover solace in a Polynesian approach to sex. Still, his heart is wholly Fermina’s.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a beautiful novel of unrequited love, suffering and obsession. In the hands of Newell and Harwood, it has been reduced to a lumbering telenovela.
As with Rosi’s epic, Cholera is visually stunning. Unfortunately, its actors keep getting in the way. Their stiffness is understandable, especially as they are called upon to bring some semblance of life to Harwood’s dialogue, with its longueurs and odd dashes of kitchen Spanish.
The most bizarre aspect of the film is courtesy of the makeup department. As we follow the characters over some 50 years, we watch them age into their dotage. But in close-ups of the actors, the makeup van’s labors are humorously obvious. Slaps of pancake here, a peek of wig netting there; the whole takes on the air of an amateur theatrical troupe that’s won patronage from Elizabeth Arden.
If this is a distancing device on Newell’s part, it fails for not finding a larger (and shall we add “magical”?) context within an otherwise slavishly realistic film.
Javier Bardem’s Florentino ages from a semi-autistic Charlie Chaplin to Hercule Poirot. Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Benjamin Bratt, as Fermina and Juvenal, appear as sleepwalkers, while John Leguizamo, as Fermina’s father, plays the role as if he were still Tybalt in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, though after that character suffered a partial stroke.
The only saving grace in this interminable film is the performance by the marvelous Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station) as Florentino’s wise/mad mother. Montenegro aside, it’s better to read the book.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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