garcia marquez love in the time of cholera

Characters who live in our imaginations have been assigned to actors, and places that exist in dreams have been assigned to locations. Now his delicate fantasy has been made concrete in this film. He is said to have popularized the uniquely South American style of magic realism, but when I read him I feel no realism, only magic. The British scandal rag News of the World (fondly known as Screws of the World) used to have a motto, 'All human life is here,' but it better applies to Gabo.

It is both, at the same time, and sad and funny, and there is foolishness in it, and drollery, and his prose dances over the contradictions. Is it tragedy, or soap opera? Ah, that's where Garcia Marquez has us. This is, perhaps, not a profound or classic story. Fifty years pass, the doctor dies, Florentino reappears to announce that his love is strong as ever, she wallops him, then she accepts him, and the decades are erased in their eyes, although not from their faces. That part of his heart is reserved forever for Fermina. He makes love with many women, but he never loves them. He is not a bad man, this doctor, and their marriage is not unhappy, and if Juvenal has a wandering eye, well, so did many men in South America of 150 years ago.įlorentino remains faithful to his first love, in spirit, if not in flesh. Young love cannot survive forever at a distance, and Fermina, half-convinced by her father's ferocity that Florentino is beneath her, marries a successful man, a doctor named Juvenal Urbino ( Benjamin Bratt). Guarded by her fiercely watchful father ( John Leguizamo), she finds ways to accept Florentino's love letters and his love, but when her father discovers what is going on, he ships her far away. If you extract the story without the language, you are left with dust and bones but no beating heart.Ĭonsider the story of 'Love in the Time of Cholera.' A young man named Florentino ( Javier Bardem) is struck by the thunderbolt of love when he first regards Fermina ( Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Gabo's work may really live only there on the page, with his lighthearted badinage between the erotic and the absurd, the tragic and the magical. Watching 'Love in the Time of Cholera,' based on another of his great works, made me wonder if he is even translatable into cinema. Small wonder that One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's best novel, has never been filmed.

Garcia marquez love in the time of cholera