Love in the Times of Cholera

For me is impossible to see this movie without looking for the magic realism of Garcia Marquez novels and before seeing it I knew -because of the headlines- that I have to be “kind” to the movie to be able to enjoy it at least a little. But of course I was curious to see the first English adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I truly hope that after this awful mess, Garcia Marquez will never give any rights to English speaking directors and screenplay writers.

It is upsetting that one of the most layered, complex and magic novels is translated into a dull period drama with terrible direction, terrible acting from great actors (had to be the director!), terrible cinematography and outstandingly terrible special effects when aging actors and then the director doing very close close-ups so we can see the awful make-up work.

Couldn’t understand the reason why all actors had to have an accent when speaking English. I know that for many of this multinational cast English is their second language, but the accents were totally ridiculous and I have heard them speaking better English in other movies. This was sad and very distracting.

I have seen almost all Javier Bardem movies and I do enjoy his performances, but here his character, Florentino Ariza is truly lame -I’m sure that the director instructions were to play it this way- when in the novel Florentino is an extremely interesting character. Same thing with Giovanna Mezzogiorno that is an excellent Italian actress with performances that give depth to her characterizations and here she is totally underused in a badly developed Fermina Urbino. One key question to the director: Why the young Florentino is played by a young actor –not Bardem- and the young Fermina is played by Giovanna when you can easily see she is older than her peers and the age she's playing? Terrible.

Okay I stop, as I could go on and on complaining about how someone can destroy an outstanding story and damage the careers of so many excellent actors. A truly amazing movie that has everything that could be done wrong exactly like that: wrong.

I strongly suggest to avoid the movie and read the book for the first time or once more to enjoy a magical story of love during more that 50 years.

This is one of the very few movies that truly made me very upset and when I left the movie theater I was very upset and absolutely disappointed… still I was controlling myself as I knew I could pour everything out here and feel a little bit better after, as I’m feeling now.