“Love in the Time of Cholera” is an eye filling, lush and voluptuous epic about a love that refuses to die.
Taken from the 1985 Nobel Prize winning novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and directed by Irish director Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”), it is not without its faults and at 139 minutes it wears out its welcome.
The reason the film has been so long in coming is that Marquez refused to allow an English language version for many years.
The picture focuses on the love story and the moving tapestry against which it is set remains mostly in the background. What we do see is dazzling – lofty mountains, golden rivers in the setting sun, lush jungles and ornate cities and towns.
Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) is a humble telegraph operator when he see the patrician Fermina Daza (Giovana Mezzoglorno), the lovely teen-age daughter of a rude and ambitious businessman, Senior Daza (John Leguizamo).
“I have found my reason for living,” he exults.
The two exchange letters professing their undying love – without ever really having met. The upwardly mobile patriarch looking for a union that will advance his own career, finds out and banishes his daughter into the interior to get rid of her obsession.
Florintino pines away but time and temperament have their way and soon Fermina is betrothed to the handsome and rich Juvemal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), doctor to the important and well-to-do. Urbino falls for the beautiful young girl and, forgetting about poor Florintino, they embark on a long and often troubled marriage.
As for her former love, she tells a friend, “He’s a ghost. An Illusion.”
The ghost, however, is steadfast. He is in love with love, has the soul of a poet and determines to wait until her husband dies to pursue his love.
In the meantime, after a humorous interlude where he loses his virginity to a mysterious and voracious young lady on a boat who suddenly drags him into her stateroom, he attempts to fill the hole in the heart with the physical love of many women. “Six hundred and thirty three (conquests),” he observes without bragging to a friend in later life.
It is no spoiler, because it comes as no surprise, that, when Urbino dies, Florintino is indeed waiting and decades of coitus interruptus are resolved.
“I have waited,” he says, at her husband’s funeral, no less, “fifty years, nine months and four days.”
Ahh, the joys of old love - leaving one a bit worried that these two, who never really knew each other, might find that fate and time are not so kind to lovers. And besides, poor Florintino has become so obsessed, you have to ask, does Fermina really want someone following her around worshipping?
The story begins in 1879 and extends into the 20th century. Revolutions come and go, successive plagues of cholera ravage the land and lives change. Through hard work and plugging away (lets face it, he hasn’t got much else going in his life), Florintino rises to become very rich.
It would be much easier to become completely enraptured with this story if you weren’t rudely pulled from it by some of the film’s failings. The accents tend to wander. Leguizamo’s Queens upbringing occasionally shines through his Latino accent. Giovana, a lovely presence and a fine actress with the face of a Renaissance goddess, sometimes slides into her native Italian cadences leaving her uncomfortably out of step with the rest of the cast.
Bratt’s urbane Doctor reminds us how fine an actor this underused star is.
Special note should go to Fernanda Montenegro (“Central Station”) who brings a great deal of animation and depth as Bardem’s fawning mother.
It’s interesting to compare Bardem’s approach here to his creepy, screen-filling turn as the murderous psychopath in the Coen brother’s, “No Country for Old Men.” There he dominates the film but in this one he seems neutered and withdrawn. His Florintino is so passive and obsessive that it is hard to work up much fervor for his lifetime of unrequited love.
The gradually aging make-up is impressive – especially on Bardem, who, with his stooped carriage, lined face and balding head makes a very convincing 70 year old. It is less successful on Mezzogiorno who still looks young – although the droopy prosthetic body they provide for her in the final scene is quite remarkable.
Newell’s tone tends to shift moving from arch melodrama, through magic realism to a kind of plodding exposition making the film seem longer than it is.
There is lots of nudity but little passion.
And so, the final scene, which should transport you, carrying you away with the beautiful pictures and the gorgeous music of Antonio Pinto’s score, leaves you on the outside as if staring at a lovely party through an ornate but clouded window.
Colin’s Rating 3/5.
USA
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