Sex in the Time of Cholera
“How long would you wait for love? …51 years, 9 months, and 4 days.”
This is the question I read in the New York Times promotional tagline of the movie adaptation of Nobel-Prize winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez romantic epic ” El Amor en los Tiempo del Cholera ” . Intrigued I remembered of when I was 15 and decided that Marquez novel would be the best and most cherished book in my life. After 22 years of its publication I did not want by all means wait one more minute, I rushed with a friend to the New York Avant- Premiere on Third Avenue.
The plot, is merely the skeleton of Marquez book. In 19th-century Colombia, a telegraph clerk named Florentino (Jarvier Bardem) falls for a young beauty named Fermina (Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Despite their mutual pledges of undying love, they are separated, first by her father (a very over-the-top John Leguizamo), then by her sudden fickleness, and finally, by her marriage to an important doctor, Urbino (Benjamin Bratt).
Throughout 53 long years, Florentino waits for her to come back to him. He has many other lovers during that time — more than 600 in fact, including one his despairing mother (the great Brazilian Actress Fernanda Montenegro) actually tosses into his bedroom — but they barely move him, registering mostly as specimens of Fermina’s sex.
The photography is amazing, sepia tones and the warm intensity of colors represent the external melange of the old exquisite and sensual Caribbean city of Cartagena under the sun , waves of Cholera, and heavy rain , and the inner expression of South American living life, love, sex and death to their extreme, the difficulty of human race to reach happiness for the sake to find after many years that death has a limitation that life doesn’t have.
Bills of ladings are written by in rhymes because love is needed in its purest form, telegrams, long passionate letters and furtive glances are exchanged during long intervals of time and in casual events during five decades between the loved and beloved.
Persistence in having decided living one’s entire life dictated by the non - conditionality of a promise in space and time is based on the simplicity of the feeling of love in its most absolute form, moreover for someone you have only seen once , and the voluntary numbness acquired passively due to family and social pressure in agreeing in wanting to believe in Custom-made- love. These are the themes of British director Mike Newell (Harry Potter, Four Weddings and a Funeral).
Colombian singer superstar Shakira poignant voice is mystically pure when she sings “Pienso en Ti” a slow version of Shakira’s hit from the 1996 album “Pies Descalzos.”while we embrace views of the wilderness of Colombian coastal region of the Cienaga del Magdalena, in which Garcia Marquez’s sets many of his literary works like if we were silently flying on delta plane . Pienso en Ti and two other soulful songs “Hay Amores ” and ” Despedida” are the result in a mostly instrumental soundtrack by Brazilian composer Antonio Pinto, who also did the music for “City of God” (2003) and “Central Station” (1998).
On my way out of the movie sipping warm Colombian Cofee with a friend from South America , we discussed that when you lived life with the inevitable privilege of having experienced true love and having being loved , the choices of paths taken towards reaching destiny , during five decades in a 19 -century Colombia at the time of Cholera, or nowadays at times of Aids and Global Warming, can still demonstrate undying loyalty by sleeping with as many people you possibly can, but in the heart never give consent.
This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to us today . On the one hand, you’ve loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions barely speak to this fact.
After a lot of silent thinking we both agreed with the following safe conclusion : Along with our fifteen years of age memories, coffee is still good, but drinking bottled water will certainly keep troubles away.
Joelle’s Picks:
The Soundrack: available on I-Tunes
The movie: Love in the time of Cholera
The book: Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez available at Amazon
The videos: Interviews of Gabriel Garcia Marquez : (how is your Spanish?)
