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Love in the Time of Cholera
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: November 19, 2007

Viewers, filmmakers, and critics, all: Beware the movie adaptation of the beloved novel. Fans of the book are inclined to resent any deviation from the story as they know it. Directors task themselves with re-creating not only the characters and events of a writer’s imagination but the spirit of that writer’s prose. And critics may feel the book’s cultural impact interfering with any kind of fair assessment of the film on its own terms. Granted, the verdict does come easy sometimes. Most everyone agrees that The Bonfire of the Vanities is a wretched movie, and The Silence of the Lambs is a great one. But when I roughed up Harry Potter earlier this year, I was told by several (pleasantly) irked readers that I had misjudged the film because I had not read the novel. Folks, can this be true? What magical combination of words, strung between the covers of J.K. Rowling’s book, wouldn’t only make the film look worse by comparison? I suppose I’ll never know, but in any case, a film adaptation mustn’t merely supplement the source material. It’s got to stand on its own two feet.

For instance: the new film Love in the Time of Cholera, based on a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here, again, I have not read the book, although back in the mid-nineties I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude by the same author, and it blew my 24-year-old mind. That book, it seems to me, would be un-adaptable for the screen, and anyone who says the same of Love in the Time of Cholera may, for all I know, be right. What I do know is this: Love in the Time of Cholera is a consistently funny film, a tongue-in-cheek melodrama about the human heart in all its beautiful folly.

The film takes place in Colombia at the turn of the 20th century. A young telegraph clerk named Florentino catches a glimpse of a young woman named Fermina, and falls instantly and passionately in love with her. He begins writing love letters to her, and playing his violin in her courtyard; he briefly wins her heart before her overbearing father takes her away into the mountains. Eventually Fermina returns to town and marries a prominent doctor, and Florentino, learning this, becomes despondent with lovesickness. As years pass, he maintains his obsessive devotion to this married woman he hardly knows, and meanwhile he becomes perhaps cinema’s all time most mild-mannered sex addict, as he systematically and more-or-less passively beds women by the hundreds in an effort to kill the pain of his heartache. He is biding his time, waiting for Fermina’s husband to die, and when that day comes, he resumes his courtship, and finally, at age seventy-something, wins the girl.

If it all sounds rather silly, it is certainly played as such by Mike Newell, the film’s director. This film takes a tone that gently mocks, one by one, the gamut of human emotion and behavior. Romance, devotion, trepidation, betrayal, jealousy, sex, sorrow, and so on—it’s all portrayed as foolishness, where at least one party is taking things way too seriously. At times, the results are a bit anecdotal; the film drags here and there as we follow characters whose behavior we’re forbidden to admire. But more often than not the results are amusing or downright funny. For instance, here’s a film where the hero is so romantic he writes his shipping manifests in verse, imploring a Miami port to accept his cargo.

Javier Bardem, as Florentino, uses his unique, vulnerable face to carry the whole movie along. He goes from painfully naïve to shamelessly heartsick to dutifully patient without ever losing his inherent sweetness. He also convincingly plays an old man who is so needless and disarming that the women in town continue to fall into bed with him, even into his seventies. Meanwhile, some of the other performers are not so brilliant. John Leguizamo, in particular, in the role of Fermina’s father, takes the film’s farcical tone a notch or three too far. But Bardem rescues everybody (and not just the actors, but the overmatched make-up artist) by somehow striking a perfect balance between clownishness and sincerity. He’s a joy to watch.

How this film stacks up against the novel, I cannot say. If it’s nowhere near as good, I would not be surprised. After all, the Marquez novel I did read was no mere whimsical trifle; the book probably changed my life. Coincidentally enough, I was rather lovesick myself at the time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. No, I never picked up a violin, but I have played one, figuratively speaking, in my beloved’s courtyard. And so, understanding, from an intimate perspective, the themes of Love in the Time of Cholera, I declare myself qualified to judge this film on its own terms. It’s a hoot, folks—a gentle satire of the human condition that never even tries to knock your socks off. What it tries to do is charm them off. And if you’re willing, what’s the difference?

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld