The Love in The Time of Cholera

From my point, cholera is just an expression of the obsession about love, which makes happiness, pain and hope intertwine together. No wonder that One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's best novel, has never been filmed. Watching \"Love in the Time of Cholera, \" based on another of his great works, made me wonder if he is even translatable into a cinema. Gabo's work may really live only there on the page, with his lighthearted badinage between the erotic and the absurd, the tragic and the magical. If you extract the story without the language, you are left with dust and bones but no beating heart.

Considering the story of \"Love in the Time of Cholera. \" A young man named Florentino is struck by the thunderbolt of love when he first regards Fermina. They fall in love with each other, however they meet a great number of blocks. On the contrary, she got married with a doctor while he just waited for her for all his life.

This is, perhaps, not a profound or classic story. Is it tragedy, or soap opera? Ah, that's where Garcia Marquez brings us. It is both, at the same time, and sad and funny, and there is foolishness in it, and drollery, and his prose dances over the

contradictions. The British scandal rag News of the World (fondly known as Screws of the World) used to have a motto, \"All human life is here, \" but it better applies to Gabo. He is said to have popularized the uniquely South American style of magic realism, but when I read him I feel no realism, only magic.

Now his delicate fantasy has been made concrete in this film. Characters who live in our imaginations have been assigned to actors, and places that exist in dreams have been assigned to locations. Yes, I know that's what all movies do with all stories, and most of the time, it works. But not this time. I don't know when, watching a movie, I have been more constantly aware of the actors who were playing the roles. That's not a criticism but an observation.

Of course, there is another problem with the movie, and it has to do with Mike Newell's direction. He is too bread-and-butter here. The story requires light footwork, a kind of dancing over the ice before it cracks, and Newell strides steadily onward. It does not matter much that the events all unfold right on time; they should seem to unfold themselves and be surprised that they have. Nothing should seem preordained, not even when Gabo uses leaps back and forth through time to let you know perfectly well what is coming. Good lord, you should think, it came to pass exactly as he said it would! Instead, you think, now her husband is going to die, and Florentino will reappear, and . .. .

As I started by saying, I'm wondering that if what makes Garcia Marquez so great a writer is his work's insistence on being read, The last internationally released film adaptation of his work, Arturo Ripstein's \"No One Writes to the Colonel \Sundance and folded; the only country where it opened theatrically was Spain. Ruy Guerra's \"Erendira \" also barely opened. For an author whose Solitude has sold more

than 60 million copies, that's not much of a record; some short stories have also been filmed, to little notice. I am told by the critic Jeff Schwager that Gabo himself has written the stories and screenplays for many Spanish-language films, but as none of them have leaped the language barrier with much ease, I wonder how successful they were.

All in all, as with the cholera, love always bring the happiness meanwhile it's sad and pain, which needs time, distance and perseverance, though the reality is so cure.