By Curt Schleier

The difference between reading a book and watching a screen adaptation of it is imagination.  Reading, you filter the character through your experiences and preferences.  The characters look and walk and talk the way you want them to, the way you interpret the writer’s words.  The author may create the characters, but the reader defines them.

In movies, however, you’re limited to watching.  The story is what it is on the screen; viewers can’t shape it to meet their own expectations.  Consider the line, “This is going to be a lesson in love.”  In the novel, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, it is spoken by Dr. Juvenal Urbino to his virginal bride in a context that can reek of passion.  When spoken by Benjamin Bratt in the film LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, it provoked gales of laughter in the audience.

And therein lies the problem of adopting a novel to the screen, generally, and with adapting LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, specifically.  The way that scene appeared on the screen, no one could imagine passion.

At its heart, CHOLERA is a story about the kind of mind-numbing, heart-breaking love every human yearns for.  In late 19th Century Columbia, a young Florentino Ariza falls deeply and madly in love with Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) the moment he spies her through the window of her family home.  He pursues her with the ardor of youth, sending romantic letters through her duena, who helps arrange secret meetings between the pair. Eventually, Fermina accepts his proposal:  “I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”


But her widowed father deems the young poet and telegraph operator an unsuitable suitor. When he discovers the romance he threatens to kill Ariza, a death he welcomes.  “There is no greater glory than to die for love,” he says.  Disgusted, the father (John Leguzamo) takes his daughter off into the country for a year.

Ariza (played as an adult by the brilliant Javier Bardem) bombards Fermina with telegrams declaring his love, but when she returns she mysteriously calls their relationship “an illusion.”  Soon thereafter she marries Urbino.

But Ariza never forgets her. Though he ultimately beds numerous women (622 by his very accurate and descriptive count) he loves only her.  And when Urbino dies, Ariza shows up at her door step on the day of the funeral, “51 years, nine months and four days” after he first saw her, and asks for her hand.

Ariza is a man of great passion.  He counts days apart from his love and writes love letters for people who lack his poetic touch.  In the book he is presented with humor and occasionally whimsy.  But in the film, too much of what he does – his bookkeeper like records of the women he beds – comes off as farce; it makes him appear less than bright and diminishes the concept of his love for the fair maiden.  Instead of being noble it’s stupid; instead of being a knight in shining armor, he is Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.  . 


Director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood give us both too much of the novel – and too little.  They are too faithful to the book, when they should have worried more about making a movie.  (Perhaps they feared criticism if they strayed far from the source.)  But where they do stray, it is in providing insufficient back story that might better explain the way some of the characters act.

It’s been over a decade since I read the book, but some of the written scenes still stay with me.  A decade from now, if I think about the movie at all, it will likely be to snicker.