Director: Mike Newell
I've never understood why people are always so quick to compare novels and film adaptations (with the almost inevitable conclusion that the film isn't as good as the book). They're fundamentally different media and as such require fundamentally different narratives.
Mike Newell has done an admirable job of adapting Gabriel Garcia Marquez's much-loved novel, "Love in the Time of Cholera." While some will doubtless complain that the film doesn't live up to the book, I was most impressed with how well it captures the story's tropical sensuality, poetic subtlety and black humor.
The film, like the book, spans more than 50 years in the life of Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), whom he meets as a young man after she moves to his town with her coarse but wealthy father.
Florentino falls hopelessly in love with her and wins her over with some seriously old-fashioned courtship, only for her disapproving father to hastily pack up and take her far away from the young man's serenading and love letters. Being a lowly telegraph operator, Florentino is not exactly the grand marital match that Fermina's father has in mind for her.
Fermina gradually forgets all about Florentino and ends up marrying a handsome young doctor by the name of Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) whom she meets when he comes to her house to treat her for a suspected case of cholera.
Theirs is not a particularly romantic marriage but it somehow endures the test of time, and the couple finds a degree of contentment, and even happiness, through sheer force of habit.
Florentino, meanwhile, slowly but surely makes a fortune as a clerk in his uncle's shipping company and sleeps with hundreds of women to console himself for the loss of Fermina, faithfully recording each encounter in a notebook.
Javier Bardem gives an outstanding performance as Florentino. As the years pass and he starts to walk with an old man's stoop (not to mention a ton of make-up), he exudes a real air of stoical dignity. His lifelong love of Fermina is almost exasperatingly impossible, but then that is the wonder of film: to show us how life might be in an ideal world.
"Love in the Time of Cholera" is a wonderfully witty and wistful film. Marquez himself co-wrote the screenplay, which should please the purists, but it's also a deeply moving and satisfying film in its own right.
Now showing in Latvia.
