The makers do not try to duplicate the prose, and the situations are not exoticised. The lovely words are complemented by lovely, unfussy imagery that makes us feel the magical realism. The magic appears as casual, as inevitable as the realism.
Arundhati Roy said she would never sell the rights for a film adaptation of her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things. This was her explanation: “Every reader has a vision of the novel in his or her head and I do not want it to be fashioned into one film. A lot of Hollywood producers approached me, but I do not want to sell the adaptation rights for any amount of money. I do not want the novel to be colonised by one imagination.” What a beautiful thought that is: that the vast and varied independence of a novel should not be colonised by one imagination. After all, the interiority of the novel is fundamentally at odds with the exteriority of cinema. The images in our heads as we read prose are half-formed – we see the people, the places, and yet we don’t. A playful form of malleability is at work here, and it vanishes the minute we see an actor in the part, or we see the setting, so vulgar in its finality. Our capacity to participate in the proceedings is diminished.
Of course, cinema has its own kind of interiority, in its pauses and in its approximations of thoughts that we can no longer read about to decipher – but we are allowed this participation only after a certain kind of “colonisation” has already occurred. We are now subjects of the imaginations of the actors and the director and the technicians. With a book, on the other hand, we are the imaginers. Anyway, like Arundhati Roy, the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez did not think much of making books into movies. In an interview, he said, “I can’t think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.” At the time, he might have anticipated Mike Newell’s severely misjudged take on Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which was released in 1987 to terrible reviews and terrible box office.
But times have changed. We are now in the age of the mini-series, where time can flow as extensively as it did in Márquez’s words and worlds. And thus we come to the Spanish adaptation, on Netflix, of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the 1967 novel that intertwines the history of the mythical town of Macondo with the history of the Buendiá family. This is a sixteen-episode adaptation, and the first eight are available now – and it’s as good as it can get. First, the makers do not try to duplicate the prose. As many readers may remember, the opening lines of the book are: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,. Colonel Aureliano Buendiá was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”
In the book, in these first few lines, the town of Macondo has already been founded. In the mini-series, directed by Alex García López and Laura Mora, the founding of this town happens midway through the first episode, and though we get the line about prehistoric eggs, it occurs elsewhere. Before we get to the opening line of the book, we get the opening images of birth and death, rot and renewal. We get faded old photographs, insects running riot, a corpse next to a cradle, and only then do we get the fantastic face of Claudio Cataño as Colonel Aureliano Buendía, facing that firing squad. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not an easy book to read, and the makers of the mini-series do not attempt to mirror that difficulty with on-screen complexity. This story is linearised. The gypsies from the book’s first paragraph appear only after José Arcadio Buendía and his cousin Úrsula Iguarán get married and José kills a man and leaves his village in search of the sea and stops somewhere and decides to call the place Macondo. What happens to the Buendías and to Macondo, across generations, forms the rest of this wonderfully strange story.
The lovely words are complemented by lovely, unfussy imagery that makes us feel the magical realism: the situations are not exoticised. The magic is as casual, as inevitable as the realism. In the book, Márquez writes: “In his youth, José Arcadio Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back.” This passive-voice passage is transformed into active voice, with a mix of the narrator speaking and the characters speaking. José Arcadio Buendía looks at Ursula and says, “We will cross the mountains until we reach the ocean,” and they look down, and we see waves where there had been dry earth. The characters’ words become the visual. This constant exchange between the narrator’s voice and the characters’ voices is beautifully done. When a young man loses his virginity to an older woman, Márquez writes of “the smell of smoke that she had under her armpits”. That sort of thing is good to read, but to hear a narrator say it, it might have been too literal. Here, the character simply says, “Her skin smells like smoke,” as he blows out a candle. The wick gives off smoke, whose smell, we presume, reminds him of the woman.
But what about One Hundred Years of Solitude as a standalone watch, without comparisons to the book? Well, it’s not an easy novel, and the series, similarly, isn’t exactly an easy watch. Magical elements like a plague of insomnia and people returning from the dead intermingle with very realistic aspects like the struggles of parenting or the pain of longing in love. The politics and history and culture of Latin America coexist with soap-operatic touches like a love triangle with sisters or a couple raising the bastard child of their son as their own. The sealed-off nature of Macondo brushes against the gradual intrusion of an external government, which issues orders like all houses have to be painted blue. But what the filmmakers have done is something remarkable. They have found a cinematic equivalent to hold these various elements together, just like the novel’s dense prose glued the whimsical little parts into one giant, organic whole.
Despite having to cover vast amounts of events and information, the story’s pace is unhurried. The events may be dreamlike, but the locations (the sets) are brilliantly real. They root the story in a tangible physicality, even when a priest begins to float in the air. The background score is otherworldly, and more importantly, minimal. There is a “lost in time” quality to the series, and this might have been impossible to achieve with non-stop music. The camera drifts and flows a lot, like time or like rivers of memory, sweeping along events in motion. The unknown faces (at least to my eyes) come with no baggage, and the brilliant actors instantly become the parts they play. Like the book, One Hundred Years of Solitude needs a bit of patience. It needs you to stick with it. But as with the book, the rewards are many. One Hundred Years of Solitude is proof that a great novel may not make a great movie, but it definitely can become a rock-solid miniseries. By the end of these eight episodes, I wanted to read the story of the Buendías all over again.
