An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Mike Newell.
Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Javier Bardem, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo
Description: Ageing lothario Florentino Ariza has always reserved a special place in his heart for one true love, Fermina. Five decades earlier, the teenage Florentino wooed Fermina secretly with love letters, only to be separated from his sweetheart when her controlling father discovered the assignations and sent his daughter far away. Eventually worn down by her father's assertions that she is too good for lowly Florentino, Fermina married a kind doctor called Juvenal Urbino, but she could not entirely erase the memory of her most ardent admirer.
Country: US. 2007. 138mins
Tying the knot: Doctor Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) and Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) get married after she has been separated from her first love, Florentino, by her angry father
Lovelorn: Javier Bardem as Florentino
Epic tale: The film is eloquently shot by Affonso Beato
A difficult-to-translate novel doesn't have to make an unsatisfactory movie: consider Atonement and The Kite Runner, the latest examples to surprise the doubters. But Mike Newell's adaptation of Gabriel García Marquez's masterpiece, though it looks good, lacks the essential magic of the original.
Glimpses of that extraordinary version of the ridiculousness of human nature, inspiring tragedy as well as ironic comedy, are dotted about the film.
We see how the lovelorn Florentino (Javier Bardem), whose passion for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) lasts a lifetime, loses his cherished virginity to a woman who unceremoniously hauls him into the state room of a steamer, and then how he paces the same corridor on the next night hoping for a repeat of the surprise erotic encounter.
We laugh when he, having admitted affairs with some 600 women many years later, tells Fermina that he has remained a virgin for her on what is finally the inaugural night for these "two old people about to be ambushed by death".
Marquez cannot be entirely extinguished even by Ronald Harwood's painstaking, competent but not very imaginative screenplay, which tries hard to compress the 500 pages of the book into a little over two hours.
But all too often the film falls into the trap of steadily piling up the bones of the book rather than leaving some of them out and putting flesh on what remains. Not surprisingly there are ponderous patches where the necessary measure of nuance is absent.
The performances too are not helped by having to traverse some 50 years from the mid-19th century to the early 20th. This means that Bardem as a young man looks too old and Mezzogiorno as an old woman looks too young. The prosthetics involved are OK in mid-shot but close-up they are sometimes far too obvious.
Both give good performances, though Bardem has to attempt to equal his villainous classic in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, which is probably an impossibility.
There, you forgot about the actor; here you seem to watch him working. Mezzogiorno is a very good young actress, as anyone who has seen her Italian work will know, but this is a tougher role than she has known and it shows.
The film starts more or less at the end of their story, directly after Fermina's husband's funeral, with Florentino's pathetically disingenuous attempt to reawaken the fires of love in her.
She screams at him to go away for ever before she relents; then we flash back to the pair's abortive love affair half a century earlier, halted by a social-climbing father (John Leguizamo) who sends his errant daughter away.
While Florentino professes undying love, Fermina gradually forgets her pangs, marrying the doctor (Benjamin Bratt) who has spent some time examining her breasts for cholera and later spends more examining those of women for other purposes. It is not a bad marriage but not a great one either. Meanwhile Florentino, having finally broken his vow of virginity, succeeds with one young woman after another.
For him it is, however, just a game. Fermina remains his real obsession as he gloomily prosecutes his career to become a successful ship owner.
I can't say those around the two leads distinguish themselves greatly. But the film is eloquently shot by Affonso Beato and nicely scored by Antonio Pinto, while Newell's traversal of the cholera epidemic that gives the book and film its title looks fearsome - particularly as the boat carrying Florentino sails by ignoring the cries for help of an infected vessel alongside it.
Perhaps those who have not read the book will find this film better value than those who have. Perhaps it was just impossible to do Marquez full justice.
Yet Mexican director Arturo Ripstein manages rather more of the Marquez magic in 1999's No One Writes to the Colonel and so did Ruy Guerra in the earlier Erendira.
It may be that, in trying to maximise its audience, Newell has actually minimised his film's potential.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Afternoon:
14°c
