Love In The Time Of Cholera

What a disappointment. I never really liked the novel by Gabriel García Márquez, but there was much to admire in it, and it could have been turned into a good film. Sadly, this isn’t it. I can’t believe that Mike Newell, who once made the wonderful Dance With A Stranger, could turn out something as awful as this. And what a wrong step for Javier Bardem after his deserved acclaim for No Country For Old Men.

Bardem plays Florentino Arizo, one corner of a love triangle which continues for several decades. The other players are Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and Dr Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). As a very young man, Florentino falls in love with Fermina and they begin to send love letters to each other. Fermina’s father has his sights set higher and takes her away to end the relationship. When she returns from her home village, Fermina can see how naïve her young admirer is and tells him it is all over. With strong encouragement from her father, she marries the young Dr Urbino. But Florentino’s love is so strong, he vows to wait for her, if necessary until her husband dies.

Set in Cartegena in the late 19th and early 20th century, Márquez’s novel deals with the clash between romanticism and modernisation. This is never truly conveyed in the film. The characters of Urbino and Fermina are one dimensional. We are shown nothing of Urbino’s lifelong work to combat cholera, nor of Fermina’s desire to surround herself with the artefacts of European culture. Apart from her beauty, there is nothing to explain why Fermina - who should be the pivotal figure - has such a hold over the desperate Florentino.

Instead, a seriously miscast Bardem struggles to portray undying love and comes over as a creepy obsessive. A lot of very close shots – meant to capture the fevered atmosphere of the times? – show us more than we want to see of his waxy-moustached face. Florentino, having first decided to remain a virgin for Fermina, soon goes to the other extreme and has more than 600 women, meticulously recording them all in his notebook, while waiting for his beloved. Could there really be 600 women who were attracted to this lugubrious character? Bardem plods through the part, looking increasingly uncomfortable, whether inviting young women into his carriage or being hugged by his equally creepy old mother.

Very poor acting abounds. And a mixture of accents. Some of the minor characters seem to be reading their lines from autocues. But then they are given some awful lines, like: “Who knows when this terrible war will be over?” There’s a war? We didn’t know that. There’s quite a lot we aren’t told. But when we are told, my, how it’s hammered home. “I used to wait for her by the lighthouse,” followed by a shot of a man standing by a lighthouse and then, just in case we hadn’t thought of it, a shot of the rough sea. Someone mentions cholera and we see a street full of dead bodies. There’s nothing subtle here.

This feels like a film which was too long in production. The pace is uneven, the acting styles too varied, even the ageing of the main characters is totally unconvincing. None of the “old” people move like old people. Fermina looks nothing like 72. Florentino seems to get older and then younger in different scenes. Worst of all is the final part of the film, the climax of the lifelong passion, which should have been moving. The problem with young actors portraying older people having sex is that, unless it’s done much better than this, you just can’t stop thinking about the make-up department. When Fermina says “Don’t look. You won’t like what you see,” you’re just waiting to see how well make-up have fixed up her sagging breasts. Actually they did a good job on this. Pity about the rest of the film.

Florentino waited 53 years for Fermina, and it didn’t feel like a minute less.