One hundred years of telenovela
I remember the first time I opened Gabriel Garcia Marquez's celebrated novel and read the sentence "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It was an intriguing opening line and I was hooked, but for some reason never made it past the second page. I put the book aside, and didn't bothered touching it again for two years.
Then sitting in a beach-- in the shade, away from that ridiculous scorching sun, while friends were in the water enjoying themselves-- I had no other choice but to pick up the book again, and this time (I think it was when Jose Arcadio, Colonel Aureliano's father, after many intricate calculations, announced to his wife that the world was round like an orange) I was well and truly hooked. I read till the sun gave up its plan to burn me and sank back into the sea to bide its time; read deep while the moon rose and kept me company; read till the moon gave up and bade farewell and sank back down and the cocks started to crow; read till there was nothing left to read, and when I put the volume aside saw my old nemesis peeking out from over the ocean's edge with a spark in its eye, fresh and ready for another round.
It was an experience and every time I've returned Marquez's story would cast its spell again and I'd be lost in the swampy jungles and stamped-dirt avenues and rumpled-sheet sweatsoaked bedrooms of Macondo, the fictional home town of the Buendias, and have to pull myself away to look around, the way gaudy corals and brilliant costumed marine life would seduce a snorkeler past his lung capacity, so he's forced to kick upwards for air.
And now this series streaming on Netflix, and I wondered: will I have that same experience? Will it dazzle me the way Marquez's prose as translated by the also brilliant Gregory Rabassa dazzled me past the point of self-preservation? Will I have that experience of shaking my head to clear my mind of Marquez's intoxicating fumes, only to find the everyday world just that much less vivid, that much more dull?
Not really. The novel survives revisit I think, but not quite translation to another medium; Marquez was long famously reluctant to sign away rights to the novel for a film translation and I suspect rightly so, because while there was much gained in this particular version there's something delicate yet vital lost, something that marks the difference between Macondo and the outside world.
But first what it gets right: the cast is marvelous and passionate, but if one had to name names one might pick out Marleyda Soto as the elder Ursula Iguaran (who grows without effort from family matriarch to unspoken leader of Macondo), Claudio Catano as the elder Colonel Aureliano (who grows without effort from introverted dreamer to relentless military leader), Vina Machado as Pilar Ternera (doesn't grow but stubbornly remains a wild card, sensual even in her old age), Janer Villarreal as Arcadio (buffoonish and pathetic until suddenly terrifyingly not-- now where have we seen that before?).
The cinematography (by Paulo Perez and Maria Sarasvati) often flows down street and hallway, helping the narrative flow from one scenario to the next; the production design by Eugenio Caballero and Barbara Enriquez is extravagantly detailed and works to serve the story, up to a point.
If I have reservations it's mainly that we're basically getting the same kind of handsomely mounted Hollywood-inspired magic realism served up to us in the past few decades, everything from Alfonso Arau's admittedly mouthwatering Like Water for Chocolate to Billie August's terminally tasteful House of the Spirits to Guillermo del Toro's lovely Pan's Labyrinth to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's bewildering Bardo to Pablo Larrain's occasionally exhilarating El Conde, most with mixed results. Which is partly Marquez's fault; the impact of his novel is such it's been imitated many times, on paper and the big screen, its wonders and miracles having been seen so often, and often to diminishing returns, that we now regard them as tropes and cliches.
What directors Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Mora bring to the table is a respectful straightforward approach, one that in many ways resurrects much of the original wizard's flavor, in many ways embalms it. Digital effects are mostly avoided, thank goodness, probably limited to erasing wires used for levitation and a brief moment where black fumes eat away at a gypsy performer; the stylized air is due less to greenscreen and more to the fastidious costuming and extravagant set dressing and design, down to the little model for the solar weapon, and the jeweled fishes Aureliano painstakingly assembles (unfortunately I thought the dirt-eating had less of a visceral impact and the block of ice was disappointingly smooth, not the world's largest diamond with infinite internal needles breaking up sunlight into colored stars (Come to think of it, can anything live up to Marquez's description?)).
But using actual locations in Colombia, and Colombians can be justly proud of how spectacular they are, to my mind only reduces parts of the series to travelogue drama. I remember Marquez being quietly insistent on not giving us an overview of the landscape, on this lack of geographic awareness actually being part of the plot (Jose Aradio B establishes Macondo on the spot where he stood because he gave up trying to find the sea). Marquez's story is about people having trouble connecting with other people, of the isolation and claustrophobia this induces, and I feel the emotional state could be better realized if the directors had used only or mostly studio sets, with constructed jungle house village. Similar films have been done before-- off the top of my head Michael Powell's Black Narcissus, Rainier Werner Fassbender's Querelle, Francis Coppola's One from the Heart, and Arturo Ripstein's Divine-- and the sense of spatial oppressiveness has stayed with me, much as it did emerging from Marquez's novel. Plus the stylization-- some of the most incredible colors and most ingenious camerawork can be seen in Narcissus and Heart-- would better approximate the fabulous texture of Marquez's prose.
The prose is key I think; the plot has grown stale with countless imitations, but the prose remains a living vital thing, pulsing to the rhythm of an aroused woman's heart. Marquez doesn't bother with a lot of talk either, just hurrying things along with an impersonal omniscient narrator (who's maddeningly coy about certain key details) and I wish they had leaned into that too, using a voiceover narrator the way Bresson does, to emphasize through repetition and focus the essential sensuality of the world. Some of the scenes involving dialogue-- I'm thinking of the moment where Jose Arcadio B takes Aureliano aside and tries encourage him to go outside and play like any normal father-- feels especially off: Jose Arcadio B is not a normal father and Aureliano is not a normal son and this scene should not come off smooth but painfully awkward, as most Buendia family interactions go.
The end result feels more like a telenovela, albeit a handsomely produced and magnificently performed telenovela. Entertaining enough and funny enough (despite the novel's tony reputation Marquez has a wicked sense of humor) to hold my attention for eight episodes, and looking forward to the next season where fingers crossed they solve the problem of realizing the novel's more challenging passages, but what I'm really hoping is that the series helps direct newly converted fans to the source material, so that the cycle can start over again.
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