Doru Pop

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

About the cinematic adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera

Notes on Cinema and Literature

 

 

Abstract: The author discusses the relationship between literature and cinema, using the lifelong “love and hate affair” Gabriel García Márquez has had with the motion picture industry. The discussion is based on an analysis of the filmed version of Love in the Time of Cholera and the problems that emerged from the production, distribution and reception of the movie. One central hypothesis of this article is that the cinema and magic realism cannot come together. The author discusses the problem of the Writer and the issue of transforming a literary work into a cinematic production. While analysing the problem of adaptation in the case of Love in the Time of Cholera, the author tries to pinpoint the intricate relationship between magic realism as literature and the magic of reality in cinema.

Keywords: Gabriel García Márquez; Cinema; Love in the Time of Cholera; Magic Realism.

 

 

Gabriel García Márquez’s short stories and novels have been subject to numerous television adaptations in Latin America, and Márquez himself has written several screenplays using his literary works as a basis for future cinematic transformation in Europe and Latin America. The first movie made after his works was in 1979, when the Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo made the motion picture María de mi corazón (Maria my Dearest). This was followed by the screen adaptation of the novel The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. The movie, called Erendira, was directed by Ruy Guerra and was broadcast in 1985. For a long time, this was the only literary piece the Nobel Prize winning Colombian author had allowed to be transformed into a movie.

A key issue comes from this reticence and apparent disdain of “Gabo”: are literature and the cinema two opposite art forms or do they have any common ground? André Bazin placed the evolution of the cinema at the moment of the “decadence of literature”[i] and many writers, starting with Baudelaire, considered the “technologies of photography” as technical means that brought about a corruption of the arts. Others were even more radical, as for Leo Tolstoy the cinema was an “attack” on literature and its methods.[ii] Is this the case with Márquez, does he consider less of the movies and more of the “high-levelled” cinema?

When Hollywood producer Scott Steindorff bought the rights for Gabriel García Márquez’s book Love in the Time of Cholera, this was acclaimed as “the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by the Nobel Prize-winning writer”. The story of the production of this movie was as exciting as the love story between Florentino and Fermina and the seclusion of the author from the movie industry was even more appealing. Apparently, the producer of the movie, Scott Steindorff, had tried for more than three years to persuade García Márquez to sell his rights to Hollywood. The persuasion process ended with a contract for about $3 million for the author and his right to be present at every stage of the production of the movie. But, the news story goes, García Márquez was persuaded by the fact that Steindorff insisted that he actually “was” Florentino and could not give up the task of making a movie out of this fictional work.

The movie started as a grand production, putting together all the ingredients for a great success and a masterpiece of the genre. The director was Mike Newell, known for his works Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Donnie Brasco – so this should have guaranteed the grand visual effects of a professional. Newell, who was consecrated as a television director, and had worked mostly for British television programs, had a movie set in a perfect location. In a superproduction type of attempt, the producers of the movie were trying to give “realism” to the movie. This was done by shooting it in Colombia’s “natural” setting, the town of Cartagena being identified as a perfect replica that would give the picture its necessary authenticity. The cathedral was “real”, the streets were “real”, and the producers of the movie had accepted the critical and theoretical speculation that the city near Magdalena River from the book was indeed the place where Márquez has spent several years in his youth.

Another “ingredient” was to bring the Oscar-winning scriptwriter Ronald Harwood (who had done the adaptation for The Pianist) to write an adaptation for the Márquezian masterpiece. Harwood did his best to reduce the multi-layered text into an understandable chronological epic. The cast of the movie followed the same logic. Distributing Javier Bardem, nominated for an Oscar and winning multiple European awards, in the role of Florentino, the Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Fermina and Benjamin Bratt as Urbino, the producers had a multinational crew and famous faces in their motion picture. Let’s not forget that Shakira was to sing the main musical theme of the movie, so all things seemed to be falling into place.

None the less, Time magazine has reviewed this movie as “a serious contender [for] the worst movie ever made from a great novel”.[iii] Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwartzbaum has depicted the movie as „peevishly disappointing” and one in which “literature is poorly served”.[iv] Finally, the movie, having a budget of over $ 45 mil., did not make more than $ 4.5 mil in the first month of viewing. What is wrong, then, with this movie? Why was it a box-office disaster and why did the movie critics comment on it in a dismissive way?

One of the problems of the theatrical representation of Love in the Time of Cholera was identified early by the critics. For example The Los Angeles Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, has described the efforts of the producers as “an enormously daunting task to adapt a book at once so sweeping and internal, so swooningly romantic and philosophical”. This is one of the central problems facing literature turned into cinema: most of the times the dramatic setting of the book does not evade the melodramatic component of movie making.

In short, the story is the same as in the book. In Colombia after the Great War, following the funeral of a man, another man comes to the widow to confess his undying love, which she dismisses angrily and sends the man away. From this we enter the recollection of 50 years that have passed since the day when Florentino Ariza, a telegraph boy, fell in love with Fermina Daza, the daughter of a mule trader. Florentino writes to Fermina, and she writes back to him, but she ends up married to Urbino, a medical doctor. While Florentino, still in love with Fermina, finds comfort in the passing love of more than 600 women, Fermina has a long term, stable marriage.

But García Márquez has built more than a love chronicle that covers both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, he has developed an entangled narrative structure that brings together literary myths (such as the myth of Don Juan, the myth of eternal love), social epic (the background of the love between Florentino and Fermina is one of the most difficult in Latin America) and everyday life – in one word, creating a masterpiece of literary magic realism.

The term “magic realism”, as defined in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh, was meant to describe the new post-expressionist art form. Latter this artistic term came to define a paradoxical artistic expression, which combined both realist and fantastic approaches to everyday life.

Following this line of thought, one of the possible answers to the problem of literature and cinema is that the literary and cultural concept itself – which Alejo Carpentier called “real maravilloso” – is incompatible with cinema. On the other hand, for Márquez cinema is “the most important discovery of our world” and “Gabo” himself has always been involved in cinema production, in directing and even in screenplay writing. He studied in the Italian Cinecitta School, where he met Cesare Zavattini and became his affectionate fan. His first important screenplay was “Tiempo de morir”, written for the young director Arturo Ripstein, in Mexico 1965. This screenplay, based much on Sophocles, and especially on Oedipus King, has influenced the Colombian writer, as it is clear in the novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Not only did Márquez study cinema in Rome, but his departure to Europe was due to the institutional creation of a film institute in Colombia. After finishing his work at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CRC), he worked for the cinema industry, and was the head of the New Latin American Cinema Foundation.

Márquez was involved with Latin American movie production, wrote for Amores dificiles, a co-production for the television, and was declaredly impressed by the Italian Neo-Realism (his early review of the Bicycle Thief is a proof of that).

García Márquez himself has complained several times about the lack of control the screenwriter has in the movie business, and has commented extensively on the role of the “Writer” in the movies. Influenced by his relationship with Zavattini, Márquez was disappointed by the dismissive role of the writer in the movie industry. While Márquez considers that “cinema was a more complete means of expression than literature”, the question remains intact – in what respect does cinema take over literature’s mechanisms and how does fiction come into place in this new medium. We have a hint of the challenge literature faces in cinema in the interaction between the Nobel winning writer and the movie producers. As Scott Steindorff has confessed, after reading the screenplay, Márquez said to the producers of Love in the Time of Cholera that they were too faithful to the original book, and that they “laughed about this”.

But actually this is one of the main issues in literary adaptations, and most of all in this particular adaptation. Love in the Time of Cholera has too close a connection to the “literal” meaning of the book, and by this it does not give space to any of the “natural elements” of cinema to come into place. This question was treated by Bazin[v] from the stand-point of the destination of movies, its effectiveness of message and meaning production. When we ask, with Bazin, “what is Cinema”, we look for the answers in the spectator. Bazin says that cinema has a “digest” nature, it provides the viewers with a narrative that is completely different from that of literature, because it is designed for the spectator and not for the reader.

Cinematic narrative deals more with the ability to give the spectator a freedom within reality and less with the intricate construction of a multi-layered narrative. This implicit oversimplification does not mean a reduction of complexity, on the contrary. The mechanisms of cinematographic art are adjacent to the other arts in the sense that – as it is for Bazin – cinema is realistic in its very nature and the fact that the camera is mediating this reality brings forward an objective reality. And, going back to the concept of magic realism, while in literary terms, myth and reality can be inseparable, writing in itself being an elaborate process of continuous fictionalisation, cinematic mythology is making mythology out of the very reality.

In the movie transformation of Love in the Time of Cholera we witness the ways by which the spectacle is degrading the story by the absence of the Narrator. Tomas Taraborrelli has addressed this outcome.[vi] While in “magic realism” the all-knowing narrator is at the centre of the story development, intermediating – as it happens in One Hundred Years of Solitude – frequent time shifts between past, present and future, the only way to substitute this presence in the cinematic language is by altering the consistency of fantasmatic projection. While the mix of fantastic projections and reality closely observed is possible through cinematic mechanisms, the mythical, magical, fantasmatic world of magic realism, living in a close contact with reality, where extraordinary events mingle with plain representations of life, when translated, becomes too blatantly realistic.

Another dimension of the question whether cinema and magic realism can cope together is generated by the fact that, as defined by Pierre Nora, cinema is an instrument of memory, a technological means to capture events and the main assumption should be that cinema is “techné”, a technological effort to compose the imaginary. The “poetry of cinema” contends that moving images imply writing on the imaginary, while literature, and magic realist literature even more so, is a way of writing with the imaginary. In this respect, since magic realism entails more than re-writing the real world, it means directing the reader’s involvement within this process, each reader being able to re-construct the real on his own terms. Magical images are used to re-draw the lines of everyday existence, for the characters and for the readers.

Along these lines, one of the issues following this argument is to be found in Love in the Time of Cholera. Although the images are graphically built, no matter how “real” they seem, finally they lack their intrinsic magic, not their ability to recreate a world, but the ability to give the viewer the capacity to construct his or her own reality. In this sense, the cinematic representation of the Márquezian universe is limitative and restrictive.

Coming to terms with mythology, while being in and of itself a form of mythology, cinematographic treatment of fictional works faces another obstacle. Marcela Beatriz Soza deals with the problem of discursive strategy of rewriting.[vii] The problem, defined by Genette as transmodalisation, means the conversion of a narrative text into a dramatic text, and then the transfiguration of this into the spectacular text, one that comes from the logic itself of cinema. Working with a limited number of scenes, a reduced number of characters, the interaction of the main and secondary roles, the cinematographic work is inherently devoid of collateral evolution.

This is explicit in the treatment of the myth of love without age, which becomes in the movie a poor realistic depiction, presenting us with a fundamental cinematographic impotence. Florentino’s “622 long-term liaisons, apart from . . . countless fleeting adventures” are briefly disposed of in a quickened narrative, without keeping the nuances of the book. For example, we are deprived of the scene where Ausencia Santander’s exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every item while she and Florentino are making love, or the fact that a girl Florentino picks up at Carnival turns out to be a homicidal escapee from the local asylum, or the scene where Olimpia Zuleta’s husband murders her when he sees a vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on her body in red paint, or even the scene when the widow Nazaret and Florentino are frolicking during a bombing, are all fast-forwarded in a race into time which the book does not indulge.

Another dramatic result of this cinematographic “sketch” is the fact that the 51 years, nine months, and four days that the main character famously waited in the novel for his true love were depicted by means of bad make-up and facial transformations that are not credible and hardly acceptable. The problem of cinema on how to change the age of a character, by keeping its physiognomic traits is, at the end, the problem of realism conflicting with the imaginary. The same goes for the scene when Florentino sees for the first time the naked and old Fermina, followed by the final love scene, when the two old impassioned partners make love on the cholera flagged ship, where the real pervades the imaginary. Basically we end up with what Robert Scholes has called “metafiction”, where the chronological development of time and the linear representation of space cease to exist.

Another observation must be made, following the suggestions of Fredric Jameson.[viii] Jameson contends that magic realism generates a “transfigured object world”; elsewhere, he suggests there is a dialectic of visuality that cannot transgress the bias of cinematic technique.[ix] The main problem for Jameson is the ideological component of cinema, and this kind of a lack of political content becomes more obvious in movies like Love in the Time of Cholera. The scenery of the movie is void of any social implications, while the presence of social strata, of ideological conflicts and of exploitation and differentiation – ominous in the book – is vaguely sketched. All the political significations of the book are lost in the cinematographic representation and the only conflict visible is that of class – the father of Fermina Daza wants a social marriage for his daughter – but no further development on this is followed. None of the postcolonial social tensions are explicit in the movie, and it is as if the fifty-year-long love between Fermina and Florentino, although having a heavy visual background, had no historical context.

In this respect, the theoretical problems of literary criticism are ignored by the movie making industry. Magic realism was conceived as an alternative to the dominant discourse of the Western culture, a discursive instrument to project not a transfigured reality, albeit a reality of transfiguration. Whereas in the book death is everywhere, fatal diseases, epidemics, and wars are combined with love, in a projection of Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, the movie has only one scene that could give away all this, and this scene is fatally mimicked from the book. During the war Florentino breaks his chastity vow to Fermina and loses his virginity to the widow Nazaret from next door, and none of the convoluted dimensions of this loss appear.

One final remark about the movie, all the characters speak English with an awful Spanish accent. The producers may have intended this as a compromise between the global market of the movie business and the need for an authenticity put forward by the Hispanic context. All that we see at the end is just a low-end masquerade of a social space that does not adhere to this logic.

 

 

References

Aguilar, Eduardo García. García Márquez: la tentación cinematográfica. Mexico City, Mexico: Filmoteca UNAM, 1985.

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Foreword by Jean Renoir, vol. I.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

McMurray, George. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980.

Menton, Seymour. Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981. New Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1983.

Stam, Robert & Alessandra Raengo (eds.). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un Deicidio. Barcelona-Caracas: Ed. Barral, 1971.

Williams, Raymond. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984.