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33 1/3 Years of Solitude

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I was excited about the Netflix production of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It was a Colombian production, so I figured it would have an air of authenticity unlike that blasphemous attempt to do The House of the Spirits some years back with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.  No wonder, Marquez refused to let anyone make his fabulous novel into a movie during his lifetime.  I think he would have been just as disappointed with this production.  While it was in Spanish, this lavish production bore only a passing resemblance to the novel.  Just to be sure, I started reading it again.  I was stunned when I reached the 150-page mark and had come to the end of the serial.  Alex Lopez and Laura Mora had only covered one third of the epic novel in their 8 hours of screentime, basically turning it into a soap opera.  

I was reminded of the scene in the novel where the town of Maconda witnessed its first movie.  Everyone was so excited.  They came back each day to watch the movie again, so heartbroken at the sad fate of the characters.  When Bruno Crespi, the projectionist, showed a new movie with the same actors, the citizens were so infuriated they ripped apart the seats and refused to go back.  How dare they live through such tragedies!

It's not like you can't make a movie or even a television serial from this great novel.  I think Alejandro Jodorowsky would have done a great job with this material.  Or even Sergei Parajanov, who did The Color of Pomegranates.  Among contemporary filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro comes to mind.  The last thing this great novel needed was to be made into a soap opera, even if the actors looked authentic.  One Hundred Years of Solitude existed somewhere between dream and reality and needed to be shown in a similar fashion.

Anyway, I'm enjoying rereading the novel after so many years.  There was so much I had forgotten like the wonderful of story of Melquiades or the effect Remedios the Beauty had on anyone who saw her impossibly beautiful face or how Ursula managed to weather all the events that took place in the fictional town of Maconda over nearly 100 years and never lose her proud bearing.  It's such a joy to read because every sentence is laden with meaning.  There is no extraneous word.  Every marvelous description adds layers to this remarkable story of how a town survives the ravages of war and peace and war again, to repeat the same tragic cycles over and over again but never losing its soul.  Truly one of the greatest novels ever written!

So, yes, it was an extremely tall order.  A filmmaker of exceptional talent might have been able to pull it off but there would have still been critics.  However, this insipid telling just leaves you with a bad taste in the mouth like reaching the grounds of a delicious cup of coffee.  You just want to spit it out,  especially knowing there will be one or two more installments along the same lines.

Whereas the novel began with the introduction of Melquiades and the impact he had on Jose Arcadio Buendia, ostensibly the town's father, the serial spends the entire first episode chronicling Jose Arcadio's two-year journey through the dense Columbian jungles for a passage to the sea with Ursula giving birth to their first son along route and being carried in a hammock for a long stretch.  Marquez may have spent one paragraph on this, but the filmmakers chose to give a lavish account that seemed to serve no other purpose than show how thick the jungles of Columbia are and how treacherous the journey.

Marquez' narrative is linear but there are any number of flashbacks and flashforwards to fill the reader in on the backstory and foreshadow events to come.  For some reason, the filmmakers took Aureliano's point of view, as he faced a firing squad. but Marquez told the story in third person, which is the only way to reveal the profusion of stories that abound in this narrative, as fecund as the jungle the town was cut from.  He also infuses the narrative with dream sequences and ghostly apparitions that led to the novel being considered part of the "magical realism" canon.  However, a Colombian classmate I knew in college said there was nothing "magical" about it.  What he writes about is very much real and she doubted whether the essence of the story could be captured in the English translation I read.

The young Jose Arcadio and Ursula are quite fetching, and there are plenty of nude scenes to wet your appetite, but it is the older pair that offers viewers some sense of the love they had for each other.  By this point, Jose Arcadio had gone crazy with his search for God in the pianola and mechanical toys of Pietro Crespi.  He had to be strapped to the large chestnut tree in the courtyard of the house by at least a dozen men as he grown to such enormous size and strength, in the book anyway.  Ursula would tend to him and tell of their Aureliano's many battles against the federal government, as she read their second son's letters to him.  The filmmakers do capture these scenes nicely.  But, when it came to the many quixotic relationships such as Amaranta's and Rebeca's feud, the filmmakers had no more clue than I did as to what created all this resentment between the cousins.  It was much more than the poor dandy Pietro Crespi.

We will have to accept this version for now.  I hope someone else will take a stab at the novel in the near future.  Reduce it to its essential elements, rather than try to capture each and every scene contained therein.  A film is largely about interpretation.  A filmmaker can have a different vision of a novel.  The most important thing is to capture its essence.  Sadly, this is what this Colombian production failed to do.

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