Breasts and tears abound in Love in the Time of Cholera. Director Mike Newell’s adaptation of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez features immersive locales and impressive period-costume design. But the film’s unconvincing characters and under-explored emotional implications of sex are not enough to fully engage the viewer.
The film begins with a man’s death. (Cue the tears.) His wife is in mourning when another man takes this opportunity to… “console” her. (Cue the breasts.) The man tells the woman that he has waited 51 years, nine months and four days for this opportunity. The emotionally fragile woman is upset at the opportunistic advance and the man is heartbroken as we flashback to Columbia circa 1880. Here the story of their relationship begins: a young messenger boy, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem), falls for the new girl in town, Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno).
After courting Fermina through a series of letters and a late-night proposal below her window, Florentino meets with Fermina’s father, Lorenzo (John Leguizamo), for an early afternoon drink. Pistol-carrying Lorenzo tells Florentino not to marry Fermina. Florentino defiantly tells Fermina’s father that dying for love is noble, heavy-handedly trying to convey a theme. The possibility of a relationship between Fermina and Florentino becomes unrealistic. Then it’s all about Florentino’s pursuit of this relationship and coping with heartbreak.
Florentino cries a lot and his mother consoles him way past an acceptable age. Watching Florentino becomes uncomforting as he develops into a social pariah, albeit local business leader. He eventually decides to cope with heartbreak by getting sex wherever he can get it. The sex never leads to a meaningful relationship and never takes his mind off Fermina even though his partners number some 600 by the end. Several of the relationships are shown in detail, randomly chosen as none has any more significance than the next. Sex’s ultimate emotional purpose in the film remains unclear because of its inconsistence use, at times even employed for lowbrow laughs.
The film’s beautifully filmed rivers, jungles, countryside and vibrant street scenes transport us to the cholera-plagued era of the narrative, but aren’t enough to save the product as a whole.
Love in the Time of Cholera falls short of being a success primarily because it is too short. The main problem is the 138-minute running time. A longer film would not only allow for the complete plot, but also for more subtle exploration of the film’s themes and full, rational development of characters. In its current form, irrational character actions and all-at-one-time opinions of life and love populate the film. Though there are moments of pleasant evocations of a bygone era and more than a handful of lovely composed scenes, <