Love In The Time Of Cholera

First published in 1985, Love In The Time Of Cholera is the most popularist of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez's oeuvre.

More accessible than that of his feted masterpiece 100 Years Of Solitude, the film adaptation treads cautiously around the magic realism that Márquez created in his complex narrative that spans decades and broadly concerns the love of Florentino (Javier Bardem) for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but touches on unrequited, marital, platonic, young, adulterous and elderly love along the way.

With so much time and space to cover, Mike Newell returns to many of the themes that permeated his last treatise on love, Mona Lisa Smile, and whilst the location has shifted to South America and the era slipped further back into historical drama as opposed to twee period piece, the same issues that affected the aforementioned Julia Robert's vehicle gradually unravel over this epic tale to create quite an antiseptic experience.

Bardem is typically magisterial and the supporting cast is uniformly excellent, yet there remains that intangible spark that serves as a perfect example of why some great books will never translate cinematically (at times the film feels exactly like the similarly themed House Of The Spirits", which sank a fantastic source novel into a turgid Euro-Pudding). Character development is rushed and the episodic nature of the story seems to shuttle between sub-plots with confusing rapidity.

Whilst by no means a wasted experience (the cinematography is incredible), there are enough jarring mis-steps that make you think that a non-Hollywood hand could have created a more intimate account of Márquez's work and as the warblings of Colombian-born Shakira close the experience, you might just wish that cholera came a little quicker to the region.

Extras: Director's Commentary, Deleted Scenes with Commentary, Making of Featurette and Theatrical Trailer.

Released on 14th July 2008 by Momentum Pictures Home Entertainment.

Written by Simon Cole.