Claire Conger

Last night I saw Love in the Time of Cholera, all 2 hours and 18 minutes.

The book, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I truly wanted that the film makers had done it justice.

By the way, if you tried to read Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude because you thought you should, but you felt like it was one hundred days of misery, don’t despair. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is one hundred times more readable than his more famous prizewinner.

In spite of the film’s shortcomings, which, unfortunately, distracted from the beauty of the story, the film neither bored nor became tiresome. Shortcomings started with the opening scene in which Dr. Urbino falls off the ladder. Both he and Fermina are at that time quite old, but they look more 50-something. Also distracting was the characterization of Fermina’s father, a bit too much a Pirate of the Caribbean.

I don’t remember, from my reading of the book, Florentino being quite such a belt-notcher as he is portrayed in the movie. (Good Heavens, he should have died of venereal disease!) I wonder if the scriptwriters considered also Marquez’s Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of my Melancholy Whores). But it’s been ten years, so I’ll go back and read Love in the Time of Cholera again, this time as El amor in los tiempos del colera, as I have given away my English copy.

This movie is definitely worth seeing. The book is better.