With the sale of the rights to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez's other monumental masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, regained attention. The difference was that it was licensed early on by Márquez himself, and in November 2007, Oscar winner Ronald Heywood (the screenwriter of the film "The Pianist") began to adapt it into the film of the same name.
Márquez wrote Love in the Time of Cholera three years after winning the Nobel Prize. During these three years, his reputation reached its peak. Unlike some of the greatest writers who no longer write masterpieces after winning the Nobel Prize, this outstanding talent continued to expand Márquez's reputation. Over the years, there has been a growing voice, and some people in the literary and critical circles have begun to point out that "Love in the Time of Cholera is an underrated masterpiece".
Some commentators believe that this is the work that best embodies Márquez's "transformation of decay into magic". In the view of young writer Ren Xiaowen, "Love in the Time of Cholera" is underestimated by many people. "Márquez abandoned 'magic' and returned to realism to tell love, and it is difficult to write a real and only love story in a classic literary posture. Know that what is near is harder to write than what is far, and that realism is harder to write than modernism. The journey from One Hundred Years of Solitude to Love in a Time of Cholera is by no means a step backwards. Coming up with a way of expressing love that has never been seen since ancient times requires far more imagination than writing about the most beautiful woman flying into the sky wrapped in a blanket. ”
There is no doubt that Márquez provided great energy for the "explosion of Latin American literature", and the writer himself was considered the standard-bearer of "magic realism"; but Márquez was by no means confined to "magic", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and the previous "Colonel Who No One Wrote to Him" and "A Murder Case With Pre-Publicized Murder" and so on abandoned "magic". The beautiful girl who ascended to heaven was gone, the blood that flowed through the foyer and the aisle to her mother's side was gone, and the mythical reality faded away, replaced by a living reality. This shows Márquez's demeanor. The film's director, Mike Newell, described the love saga this way: "The rich clues of this story are like the ocean, it tells the whole truth of human beings from young to old, and I can see my parents, my youth, my own life and all my friends from the book..."
Due to its unique status and influence, the release of the film was also a long journey. The producers and director engaged in tug-of-war negotiations with Márquez. "We've been fighting and I can't accept any 'no' answer unless it's 'no proplem'. For a whole year, the response we received was all rejection, hopeless... Then finally one day, we got a word from Márquez – 'maybe'. It was a great step forward, and at the beginning of that day, I finally saw a glimmer of light. It took us another year to convince the authors of our loyalty to the book, that we would follow the book as it was without compromise, and that we were going to make a great movie. In fact, executive producer Standorf spent more than three years fighting for the rights to Love in the Time of Cholera, and he even wrote to Márquez, claiming that he would be like Alyssa in the book and would not give up for fifty years.
When the first draft of Ronald Heywood, the screenwriter of The Pianist, took shape, Standorff visited Márquez with him to make sure the film truly reflected the soul of the novel. The result was quite unexpected, and Márquez asked only one problem with the first draft of the script — that is, the system of being too faithful to the original book, "If you want to make a movie, you need to get out of the book." I don't think it's the first time you've heard the word 'adaptation'. ”
Standorf recalled: "He [Márquez] was really humorous, we looked at each other and started laughing. In the next crucial step, Standorf found the ideal director for the film, Mike Newell, who had just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Newell's previous films, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, were also in a non-traditional romantic style. In the end, Newell brilliantly recreates the core of the story in the film, exploring all the possibilities of love — not just through the eyes of the protagonists, but also through the hearts of their fathers, mothers, and friends.
Author: Paparazzo
Editor: Chen Xihan
Editor-in-Charge: Wang Yan
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.