From the Book to the Large Screen: Love in Time of Cholera

A few days ago, I took a brief break of my IT consulting work to see the romantic masterpiece Love in Time of Cholera (El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera), based on the Colombian Noble Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s novel by the same title. The Colombo-British production provided a refinement to the nearly poetic book featuring García Márquez’s magic realism. The leit motif of the story is love rather than cholera. While being very successful flirting, Florentino loses his great love, Fermina, to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who has the chance to meet Fermina during an emergency medical examination. They promptly get married and enjoy a one-year Paris honey moon. Florentino who has the poetic gift to write conquers all sorts of love, but not the one that fills him beyond the physical, and continues to seek his spiritual conquer through his senior years. After the accidental death of Dr. Urbino, Florentino gets to accomplish his late conquer.

The action takes place in the Northern Colombian City of Cartagena for the most part, but it expands the Magdalena River basin through the city of Neiva, where Fermina’s father has an important farming business.

Having once entered the world famous Castle of San Felipe de Barajas, I personally experienced the unrealistic view of looking at a hypothetic military attacker who could not see me through the square rock solid castle “windows”, which reached lower levels were the sea water gradually invaded the castle foundations. This is one event that romantically linked me to Cartagena. A second one was my recall of college friends who certainly deserved my attention. But Cartagena will also be in my mind, not only for just being 200Km from my city of origin, Barranquilla, but also because it was there, at Bocagrande beach, where the sea almost swallowed me when I was just around 18, during a school entertainment trip. These personal impressions actually fed my external perception of the movie, but they do not affect the highly emotional and vivid romanticism living in GGM’s poetic magic realism. Significantly, I believe that Love in time of Cholera is worth studying and analyzing. Watching the moving was outstandingly emotional for me, so I could experience every feeling accordingly. In fact, the last time I visited Cartagena, I sat with the Colombian Navy leaders for an elegant dinner at their Yatch Marina Club to receive the University of Cartagena’s Department of Economics literary prize for my short story “No me sigas, María” (“Don’t Follow me, María”), later published by the well-known El Espectador’s Magazín Dominical (Sunday’s Magazin). It was an exciting moment that I got to recall again during the movie’s life action.

For at least eight years, my French literature teachers at the Alliance Française expressed their concerns that García Márquez had received his Noble Prize due to “his only great book” One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many other literary critics worldwide now agree otherwise, while he has greatly enhanced his work since 1982 when he was awarded the Noble Prize. The fact is that Love in Time of Cholera has great content, and elevates love as its main idea rather than cholera, that becomes a background topic, literarily lived.

The characters are vivid, the presence of the cocheros chambaculeros, to designate the drivers of the century’s cars, patent a love story driven by a poetic approach, where the art of seduction by writing is frequently used as part of Northern Colombian courtship history, by Florentino, Juvenal, and with some latency in Fermina’s responses. In fact, it is also used by those who will attain love by making a line and to pay for Florentino’s verses.

Furthermore, the secondary characters have also great power, such as those suffering from cholera. The servants, both urban and farmers, and other supporting characters fill the scene. But significantly the most important collective character is represented by the prostitutes, who play a complex, but magically impressive role. Unlike Erendira, one of GGM’s shortest novels, they are quite free! Indeed, they are not either kidnapped, abused, or exploited by a visible or hidden pimp, nor under the influence of any voodoo black magic keeping them catatonic, and apparently not against the law either. There are no pimps, unlike many fiction and real stories worldwide today. Instead, they are free and happy to deliver themselves on demand for love and money, so they are sweet, such that we can state that both the novel and the movie idealize the sex workers, as García Marquez has called them many times in this and other books “putas felices”. These happy characters are not surreal, but magically real, such as indianism —not indigenism— idealized the South American Indian through the colonial literature. Most of these scenes reflected factual and authentic environment in spite of my lack of experience in the field limited to pure perception, yet they were sparkled with the well-known hot British “have it off” in a couple of scenes, and I hope not to lie on this one. So these women, who dance cumbia and vallenatos indoors and outdoors, are definitely the best counterpart to both the physical and platonic loves of the main characters. Besides, the relevant sex scenes are strongly vivid. Whether they involve marital, or extra-marital affaires, or simply casual sex, the sex is always good, but it has been elevated to a good artistic level, and they cannot in any manner be compared to Ovid’s eroticism or today’s date pornographic literature, in particular, that available in the web.

Similarly, the violence is actually sudden but minimized, and love related. The first violent scene comes from Fermina’s father who threatens Florentino with a gun, while Fermina has already pointed a knife to her own neck in rebellion. The second and most dramatic scene features a wife’s infidelity. After Florentino seduces a nearby wife, inking in indelible red her belly with the message “This is mine” and an arrow pointing downwards, her husband goes on to cut her throat with a kitchen knife, while she attempts for the last time to remove the scarlet ink. This reminded me of Musset’s puritanical perception of love when stating: “On ne badine pas avec l’amour”. There are not too many violent scenes as in his novels “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, GGM’s masterpiece, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, and therefore love and the poetic colonial landscape prevail at times nuanced by the wilderness of the Colombian mountains.

The movie, which ends, with the final conquer of Fermina by Florentino, after 53 years, 9 months, and a few days, features the so expected spiritual conquest of Florentino’s beyond his physical love. Thus, Florentino, already senior, gives up his young college lover of the moment for his unique love.

From my readings of García Márquez, I am certain that this is by far the least scatological of his novels, in both the biblical and sordid sense of the word. The movie also reflected the gaps that I had during my reading in visualizing the scene environment and ambience, which could force me to reread the book, as it happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude, even after two outstanding high-school and college literary analyses. Incidentally, I personally consider The Autumn of the Patriarch one of García Marquez’s best and most poetic and well-written books, and the one that I read in chunk with great pleasure.

On the other hand, the novels published by García Márquez after 1982, his Noble Prize year, have been sparkled with a good level of Kafka’s mystery, and his great inheritance from Honoré de Balzac, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos.

Upon reviewing the movie, I realized it had been scored with a two and a half stars, which seemed to me rather low, since it beautifully presents a universal love story beyond any cultural boundaries in the Northern Colombia region of the 19th century.

When I left the movie theater, I realized that only about a dozen people had attended the only daily showm that early Monday afternoon, but perhaps someone else was still hiding behind the hall curtains.