Transatlantic Cinema Gems

Gabriel García Márquez: A Struggle from Page to Picture

By Sybilla Hamilton and Oliver Little

There was a time when Gabriel García Márquez was an advocate for the inextricable links between literature and film. One of the greatest novelists to come out of Latin America, he was also a lesser-known film critic, screenwriter, and film-school director. Attempts at cinematic adaptations of his work have been mixed, however. The most recent episode in this saga of filmic endeavours is Love in the Time of Cholera, Hollywood’s first adaptation of a García Márquez novel. Despite the feature’s star-studded cast including Javier Bardem and Giovanna Mezzagiorno, and a world-renowned literary genius as its basis, it received low critical reception upon release in 2007. The adaptation’s box office, critical misfortunes, and the ensuing blank canvas from Hollywood vis-à-vis García Márquez’s other masterpieces, typify a curious cinematic struggle in adapting his work from page to picture.

Love in the Time of Cholera marks Hollywood’s awaited success in a perennial battle for the rights to adapt García Márquez novels. This burdensome battle with a less-than-fairy-tale result oozes irony, since the very narrative essence of Love in the Time of Cholera is, in itself, a futile pursuit. It tells the story of Florentino Ariza, a poor telegram boy who falls in love with Fermina Daza and, for more than fifty years, battles the barriers of class and her tyrannical father, to no end. Ultimately, she marries a rich and successful physician named Juvenal Urbine, and a union between Florentino and Fermina can only occur fleetingly after Urbine’s death. However, García Márquez’s penchant for realism in Love in the Time of Cholera and many of his novels seems to form a less-than-perfect fit for Hollywood’s rigid emotive arc. Whereas Hollywood is characterised by driving emotive plotlines, rife with drama, conflict, heroism and resolution, García Márquez allows the reader to question the novel’s themes, his characters’ motives and values. His read-between-the-lines approach conjures up a less than conclusive denouement. In the novel, Florentino is neither heroicised nor villainised for his incessant pursuit and fervent obsession with Fermina, and Juvenal’s character is similarly flawed, thus creating characters that are much more complex than the typecasts of Hollywoodian drama with their black-and-white motives.

Love in the Time of Cholera

At a superficial level, the premise of the novel is subsumable within the Hollywood archetype: a fictitious town, central themes of romance, conflict, and class through the trope of a fifty-year love triangle (1880 to 1930). However, García Márquez develops this plotline merely as a framework around which he can thread ideas of true love, obsession and possession. The lack of resolution and the apparent success of Florentino in being with and perhaps finally seducing Fermina also subverts the typical Hollywoodian film, in which the protagonists succeed, and antagonists fail. García Márquez’s Florentino, as such, could be seen as both protagonist and antagonist.

“I felt so out of place in the film world that I began writing ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ which as I’ve always said is written against the cinema, in the sense that it sets out to show that literature has a much vaster scope, much greater possibilities for reaching people than the cinema.”

This view is compounded by the incompatibility of García Márquez’s magical realism with cinema, painting a bleak picture of Cien años’s cinematic future. The notion of the fantastic is, by definition, overblown; García Márquez’s literature was somewhat minimalist by comparison, with much left to the imagination and more focus on reality than fantasy. Yet very little by way of the fantastic can be left to the imagination in film. García Márquez’s in-between idea of a fantastic reality, or rather a reality that is fantastic, is yet another complication which suggests that a Cien años feature is a long way off yet.

Cien años will however be getting a much-anticipated Netflix series, with García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, as producers. This appears to solve the problem of condensation, with multiple series of multiple hour-long episodes providing a more promising platform for such a dense narrative. In order to avoid the pitfalls to which Love in the Time of Cholera fell victim, the brothers must distance themselves from the Hollywood archetype. In order to support our more optimistic view here, the relative success of García Márquez adaptations in Latin America merits brief attention. Works such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba and Eréndira, Mexican and Portuguese-Brazilian features respectively, received the greatest critical and public acclaim of any García Márquez adaptation to date.

In line with this, we hope that the Netflix adaptation of Cien años stays as local as possible: Spanish language, Colombian actors, a focus on reality that is fantastic, rather than fantastic reality. The success of a series such as another Netflix original, Narcos, is testament to the openness of wider viewership to purer, more localized depictions – something that director Mike Newell, in his approach to Love in the Time of Cholera, seemingly did not believe existed. It is where the series is placed on the continuum between the purer, more localized portrayal and the so-called Hollywoodisation of the adaptation that, for us, is its make or break.

Then again, maybe we can attribute the cinematic failings in readapting García Márquez’s  works to one of his many musings: “I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.” It is safe to say that the great man’s works rank in the former.