Die Liebe in den Zeiten der Cholera...

Garcia Marquez "Liebe in den Zeiten der Cholera" ist verfilmt worden...eine kritische Besprechung aus dem Lancet - Love conquers Ageing by Anne Hudson Jones, The lancet, Volume 370, Isuue 9605, Pages 2091-2092

Love in the Time of Cholera
Directed by Mike Newell, produced by Scott Steindorff, screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez. New Line Cinema, 2007.
Now on general release in the USA and showing in the UK from March 21, 2008.

The film version of Love in the Time of Cholera simplifies and smooths out the complexity and unruliness of Gabriel García Márquez´ great novel. In so doing, screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) have created a visually beautiful work that has lost much of the power of the original. García Márquez´ novel has much of interest and value to say about the difficulties of ageing, the challenges of bringing European medicine into late 19th-century Colombia, and the failure of western rationalism and scientism in face of the fecund life and imagination of the New World. Unfortunately, these dimensions of the novel do not survive translation to the screen. Although the basic contours of García Márquez´ plot are intact in the film, the episodes and details that have been cut away are the very ones that make the novel important for medical readers. And virtually no vestiges of magic realism survive. Even the brightly coloured exotic flowers on black backgrounds that appear on screen at the beginning of the movie are, like the film, beautiful but flat.

What remains in Harwood and Newell's version is a tight focus on the love story of Florentino Ariza (Unax Ugalde, then Javier Bardem) and Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), which has been interrupted by her long marriage to Dr Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). After he learns of Urbino's death (which occurs early in the film), Florentino goes immediately to visit Fermina, telling her that he has waited faithfully for 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days to begin his courtship of her again. She unceremoniously sends him packing, just as she had done all those years before. But Florentino has not waited so long to give up easily, or at all. As he did in the first days of their youthful love, he writes her letters, which she eventually begins to read. Winning through his letters what he could not win in person, Florentino finally receives a response and is allowed to visit Fermina. The film closes, as does the novel, with their voyage from Cartageña, up and down the Magdalena River on the New Fidelity, a riverboat flying the flag of cholera as a defence against other passengers or any interruption of their newly consummated love. The film maintains, even relishes, the irony of Florentino's proclaimed virginity as he professes his fidelity to Fermina, despite his having kept a careful count of the 622 women he has bedded during the half century that he has been separated from his true love. New fidelity, indeed.
Presumably to maintain the tight focus of the film, Harwood and Newell sacrifice the novel's opening episode, an unforgettable scene in which 81-year-old Dr Urbino is called to attend the death of his chess partner, the Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. At the scene, Urbino recognises the smell of bitter almonds—cyanide—which reminds him of the many suicides he has seen from unrequited love. But it is not unrequited love that has motivated Saint-Amour's suicide. To the contrary. Years before, he had decided to take his life at the age of 60 years to make sure that he would never grow old. His is a rational, prophylactic suicide, carried out despite his health and the continuing love of his mistress. Against the backdrop of his suicide, the opening pages of the novel detail Urbino's struggles to deal with the physical and mental losses of his own ageing. He is living through exactly what Saint-Amour feared and wanted at all costs to avoid, but Urbino dares not think of suicide himself, presumably because of his Catholicism. Saint-Amour's act also provides a contrast with Florentino's passionate resolve not to commit suicide as a result of his unrequited love for Fermina but to outlive Urbino and woo Fermina again. In triumph over rational gerontophobia, the love of Florentino and Fermina survives “forever” because Florentino can not only endure but also prevail over ageing. The film captures the novel's ending but greatly diminishes the odds against which it was achieved.

García Márquez´ novel has recently enjoyed a renascence on The New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list since being chosen as a featured selection of Oprah's (Winfrey) Book Club. Just after the US release of the film last month, the novel moved into first place on that bestseller list. Thus, despite its shortcomings, I urge those who have not read the book to see the film, in the hope that they, too, will be motivated to read the novel and appreciate the true depth of García Márquez´ work.