Love in the time of Cholera (9/10)
by Tony Medley
One of the tests of a movie
for me is its staying power. Do I watch it and forget it? Do I think
about it later? If so, when I think about it later, are my thoughts
emotional? This one passed all of my tests with flying colors. While
this didn’t affect me as deeply as The Notebook (2004), despite
its two hour-18 minute running time, it has stayed with me. When I think
of it, I still feel some of the romantic emotion I felt while actually
watching it.
Teenager Florentino Ariza (Unax
Ugalde) spots Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) through a window and
becomes instantly, head-over-heals infatuated. A telegraph clerk and
poet, he courts her by smuggling letters to her, unbeknownst to her
father (John Leguizamo). He wins her heart, but her father finds out
about it and banishes her to the countryside for a year. When she
returns, she feels Florentino was an “illusion” (an idea suggested by
her father) and marries the natty Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt),
who first sees her when he examines her chest while she is ill.
Florentino (who morphs into
Javier Bardem as he becomes a man) doesn’t give up and idolizes her
throughout his life, as we follow him and her throughout both their
lives. Florentino must have something not apparent to the casual viewer
because, by his own count, he beds more than 600 women while waiting for
Fermina.
This is the thoroughly
romantic story told in 1985 Nobel Prize-winning novel of Gabriel García
Márquez of the same name. Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar® for The
Pianist, has written a good, relatively cliché-free script that hold
interest for the entire 138-minute running time.
While some may find
Florentino’s single-minded obsession with a woman with whom he had
little more than a fleeting relationship a little hard to swallow, I buy
it because men can romanticize a woman of his youth, and she never ages
in his mind’s eye.
Florentino’s obsession is
even more understandable by the failure of Fermina to age realistically.
She stoops a little and walks slower and her hair greys, but her face is
still the unlined face of a youthful woman. In fact, at 72, Fermina
looks almost exactly as she did at 21. Florentino ages more in line with
human nature. In real life, of course, women show their age far more
than men. But this is a highly romantic fantasy. In order for an
audience to buy it, the woman must remain as attractive as she was when
they first met, and director Mike Newell gives Fermina the ability to do
just that.
However, when Fermina sheds
her shirt near the end, her breasts look old and unflattering. Since we
have already seen them at the beginning of the film when she is 20
years-old, we have a good comparison. How did they accomplish this, you
might ask, as did I, because there is a tracking shot that starts at
Fermina’s face and slowly goes down to a view of her 72-year-old chest.
To accomplish this feat, the filmmakers used a body double and utilized
a London company called “Double Negative” to do a face replacement. It
is a remarkably seamless homage to Hollywood legerdemain.
November 9, 2007
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