Love in the Time of Cholera

For its legions of fans, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, is akin to a Rosetta stone, the premier text of love, transcendence and spectacular writing. So screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Pianist, and recent the upcoming film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) had an almost insurmountable degree of difficulty, not only in adapting Márquez’s dense, magical realist prose, but in winning over the novel’s fiercest devotees.

Newell has enlisted a stunning cast to bring the multi-generational tale to life, most notably with Javier Bardem in the role of Florentino Ariza, who, as a young messenger boy, falls in love with the aristocratic Fermina Daza, only to pine for her for more than 50 years as their native Colombia is wracked by cholera and revolution, and she is married to the prosperous Dr. Juvenal Urbino. The standout is the luminous Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who as Fermina swoons and moons with just the right seductive sadness.

Newell’s adaption is nothing short of lush, extravagant, sad and touching throughout.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post