Comparisons between books and the films inspired by those books seem to me to be completely useless exercises. Literature and Film are two arts that work with completely different materials, their creative processes have nothing in common and literature lovers appreciate them completely differently than film lovers. I will therefore say nothing about the novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel García Márquez. I will write about Mike Newell‘s 2007 film ‘Love in the Time of Cholera‘, whose screenplay written by Ronald Harwood is a film adaptation produced in Hollywood (but filmed in Colombia), as if I had not read the book. The film itself, with its qualities and flaws, deserves its own assessment.
We can consider ‘Love in the Time of Cholera‘ a variant of the eternal love story between Romeo and Juliet, a variant in which social constraints and the blows of fate do not spare the heroes, but which does not end tragically or quickly. In fact, the love story between Fermina Urbino – the only daughter of a wealthy merchant – and Florentino Ariza – the poor nephew of the owner of a large shipping company on the rivers of South America – spans more than 50 years, covering the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Fermina and Florentino fall in love at first sight, swear eternal love to each other, clash with the opposition of the girl’s tyrannical father, are violently separated, break their vows, but each remains faithful to the other in their own way. Fermina is convinced by her father that her love for Florentino was just a whim of youth, marries a famous and wealthy doctor, and has an apparently happy and normative marriage, according to the criteria of the era. Florentino, who in the meantime becomes rich in order to erase social differences, remains faithful to her and even swears to remain chaste while waiting for her. He doesn’t quite succeed in this, but on the contrary, he becomes a formidable lover, who collects and documents hundreds of ephemeral relationships with women. The accidental death of Fermina’s husband creates the opportunity for the two to be together again after more than half a century. What is left of the flame of love? Is a happy ending still possible despite the irreversible passage of time?
The approach of the script and the cinematic solutions belong to the space of Latin American soap operas with Hollywood adjustments. There are plenty of opportunities to say much more about the persistence of love faced with the passage of time, historical prejudices and social barriers. A secondary subject, maybe equally interesting, is related to the relationship between physical love and spiritual love, about how sexuality can be a balm that can soothe a man’s suffering from an unfulfilled love. The very word ‘cholera’, with its double meaning in Spanish, could have been a source of ideas that could find a cinematic equivalent. Mike Newell was much more inspired in other of his films. Here he seems to have found only superficial solutions, simplifying the feelings and representing the other America from the perspective of the North to the South. It doesn’t help that the film is spoken in English with an accent, as many of the actors belong to the Latin space (but not necessarily the Spanish speaking one). Javier Bardem creates here, in my opinion, one of his best roles, acting with an innocence that I didn’t know in him combined with passion. I found the casting of Giovanna Mezzogiorno in the role of Fermina less successful. The Italian actress, who was 30+ years old when the film was made, plays the role at all ages, but neither her expressive power nor her makeup keep up with her character’s advancing age from 20 to over 70. The rest of the cast is just OK. The only other role that caught my attention was that of Florentino’s mother, one of those women full of accumulated wisdom and integrated into the exuberant surrounding setting who belong to the Márquez space, played by Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro. Otherwise, this version of ‘Love in the Time of Cholera‘ is nothing more than a Latin American soap opera made in Hollywood, a quite banal one that leaves the impression that it could have been much more.