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Hello everyone, today I want to warn you about one of the biggest HOAXES I've had the misfortune of seeing at the cinema lately.
If you have read "Love in the Time of Cholera" by the immortal Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time, keep away from this insipid and gaudy film adaptation.
Plot: the young Florentino Ariza is hopelessly in love with the beautiful Fermina Daza. Her father wants nothing to do with it and marries her off to a handsome, cultured, rich, kind, and caring doctor who gives her mind-blowing orgasms in bed. Mysteriously, Fermina Daza forgets about Florentino Ariza. However, the latter continues to be hopelessly in love with her and waits for her until the death of her husband, in hopes of reuniting with his beloved. However, he waits "in the South American way," that is, by sleeping with thousands of the most beautiful and alluring women of the Caribbean: curvaceous widows with amber skin, sensual maids with nipples so hard you could hang a picture on them, things like that. A miserable life. But the protagonist (incredibly) manages to resist, and at the end of the film, will have a tender love affair with this granny with a soft belly and breasts down to her knees. Happiness.
The devoted reader of Márquez is given plenty of reasons to get mad as hell. Writing as such plays a very important role in the book. Florentino, to make a living, writes love letters for a fee, on behalf of illiterate people, thus managing to express all the love he feels for Fermina, crafting letters that are so beautiful and effective that they always hit the mark, allowing the various suitors to win over the loved one. Even Fermina herself will know and be captivated by Florentino thanks to his inspired letters. You won't believe it, but in the movie, the protagonists... AARGH! Write in English! How, damn it, the book oozes Spanish (or rather: Hispano-American), even in the Italian version, and they write in English! I understand it’s a mega-production, and you have to appease the average "cultured" American viewer, which means an idiot who graduated high school and read two paperbacks in their life, but here we’re really out of God's grace!
The screenplay simply unravels Márquez's masterpiece into a trite, banal, and inexorable sequence of episodes. Anyone who has read any book by the Colombian master knows that you can't serialize it in this way: it would be like trying to admire the Sistine Chapel in a pixelated 50-kilobyte jpeg photo... The good Mike Newell diligently performs the task by lining up the scenes and shots, like an elementary school child drawing letters on a lined notebook. Who knows, maybe it would have taken a Fellini, or a Kusturica... But in this case, a serious film would have come out, not this picturesque melodrama for gullible people.
Javier Bardem, in the role of the eternal suitor Florentino Ariza, manages fairly decently. Giovanna Mezzogiorno is always an austere and sensual beauty, although a little dazed with her eternal gaze of blue eyes. But the paradoxical aspect of the casting was choosing two white European actors for the roles of the protagonists and pairing them with luxurious local beauties, both male and female, making them look like mozzarella. I mean, do you know the beautiful people you find around the Caribbean? Fermina Daza married the doctor Juvenal Urbino instead of Florentino Ariza? AND THANK GOD, he's ten times cooler! Not to mention the splendid, intoxicating mulatto women that the "poor" Florentino, to "console himself," incessantly sleeps with for three-quarters of the film. It's the kind of thing that sends you running to the bathroom to masturbate. Which one thinks: Florentì, but leave that girl with the sparkling eyes...
Pristine, meticulously clean, nauseatingly picturesque scenography, they even groomed the palm trees here so that even the dimmest folks understand that we're in the Caribbean and not stuck at a traffic light at rush hour in Quarto Oggiaro.
Do you happen to know that old sketch where Enrico Montesano played a wealthy and daft old American lady, chauffeured around Rome by a handsome escort ("Salvatore, Salvatore, tu mi piaci a tutte l'ore!"), who, at every mindless piece of marble poking out of the street would exclaim ecstatically: "MOOOLTO PITTORESCOU!!". Well, this is surely what hordes of dotty old ladies from Minnesota or Sussex must have exclaimed upon seeing this film.
TO BE SENT TO THE STAKE, THOSE WHO CHARGE YOU 7 EUROS FOR THIS RUBBISH!
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