When people assure you a novel is unfilmable, they usually mean they don’t much like the source material and want to tell their own story instead. For proof, just look at those adaptations that do adhere closely to the original – Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, or Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies.
Tolkien and Frank Herbert are routinely cited as writers who could not possibly translate to the screen. Another is Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, whose 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Netflix from Wednesday), did so much to make “magical realism” a respectable literary genre and which has come to occupy the same place in the South American consciousness as Ulysses in the Irish one.
Nobody was more convinced of its un-filmability than Márquez – who, during his life, forbade any attempt to transpose the story to film or television. But with his death in 2014, the wheels were set in motion. Now, here arrives Netflix’s lavish take on the tale of a metaphysical town in the Colombian interior, which becomes a metaphor for the traumas that stalked Latin American society through the 20th century.
The novel has sold more than 50 million copies but is by all accounts a challenging read: either you dive in head first and don’t bother at all. The same is true of the series, which begins with – yikes – cousins José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales) announcing they are to marry, only for Úrsula to be promptly (and not unreasonably) trussed up in a chastity belt by her mother.
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Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a woozy, feverish watch. It isn’t very bingeable – nor should it be. Yet its meditative tone is counterpointed by a steaminess that sometimes verges on unintentional hilarity.
You can sympathise with the producers, who had to squeeze in lots of the sex that features in the novel without coming across as sleazy – not a problem confronting Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (unless A Long-Expected Party has a different ending to the one I remember). Still, it’s all a bit early Game of Thrones: the first episode alone has so many scenes of José Arcadio and Úrsula wriggling around in bed that you wonder if you’re watching a literary adaptation or a sordid Colombia remake of an early Paul Verhoeven erotic thriller.
Along with the quasi-nudity, there is a fair degree of violence. First up, José Arcadio stabs a villager who mocks his sexual prowess (the chastity belt having become an open secret – as is the way with villages full of gossip).
He comes to regret his murderous rage as the ghost of the killer follows him around – even into the marital bed chamber. To escape, he and Úrsula depart for the coast. Or so they think. Instead, they end up in a swampy valley, where they establish from scratch the town of Macondo – an accursed, liminal motherland where their descendants will live and die. They include colonel Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cataño) the first person born in Macondo, whom we meet just as he is about to be executed.
It is hinted throughout that they have left the mortal realm and passed into a twilight place not quite of this world. A sailing ship pops up in the jungle – evoking memories of Fitzcarraldo (the 1982 Werner Herzog movie, not the Frames album). Strangers playing music emerge from the undergrowth, like visitors navigating limbo. The sense that José Arcadio and Úrsula’s original sin – all that kissing cousins stuff – is following subsequent generations is profound.
There are echoes throughout another Herzog film, the nightmarish Aguirre, the Wrath of God. That movie was a scream into the void about Conquistadors who defile this virgin land and pay a heavy price. One Hundred Days of Solitude seems to orbit similar themes of humanity representing a wound in the natural landscape that cannot be healed. It makes for heady, uncanny viewing – with the caveat that it is best enjoyed in morsels rather than all at once.
