Film review: Love in the time of cholera

Published on Friday 21 March 2008 18:14

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA (15)

Director: Mike Newell

Running time: 139 minutes

**

IN A long career, beginning with Coronation Street, veering through Budgie, Play For Today, and peaking with Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, Mike Newell has acquired many gifts. But the director is to be commended for his achievement with Love In The Time Of Cholera, because he has taken a story about a man who sleeps with 623 women, and made it boring. Even more remarkably, that man is played by Javier Bardem, a performer who brought a sexual charge to the life of a depressed quadriplegic in The Sea Inside. Yet here, as a lovelorn Lothario, he is enfeebled, and forced to spend much of this long film playing second fiddle to a waxed moustache.

Bardem is Florentino Ariza, a telegraph boy in Colombia in 1879, who falls in love with Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Bafflingly, this is an English-language film with Latin actors, so it's little wonder they sometimes have the look of people who have just woken up in the wrong picture. Even more puzzlingly, the teenage Florentino is played by Unax Ugalde, whose resemblance to Bardem is not persuasive, though it is more convincing than Bardem's impersonation of a lusty codger in a taupe suit.

Anyway, the young Florentino takes one look at the young Fermina, and declares: "I have discovered the reason for my existence." (They talk like Penguin Modern Classics in 19th-century Columbia.)

Unfortunately, Fermina's monstrous father (John Leguizamo) does not like the cut of Florentino's jib, and forbids their relationship, ferrying Fermina by mule into the depths of the countryside. They keep in touch by romantic telegram, which works for a while because Florentino is a poet, but eventually Fermina tires of romancing by 19th-century text message, and declares that Florentino's love was just an illusion. She then contracts a nasty bug, which is though to be cholera, but is actually an intestinal infection, which allows Dr Juvenal Urbino (Law & Order's Benjamin Bratt, with a goatee) the excuse to take a good look at her magnificent bosoms.

"Senorita, I would like to take your pulse," he says, and Fermina, with all her experience of laboured poetic metaphor, knows exactly what he means. Soon they are married, and Florentino is pledging to remain a virgin for the rest of his life.

At this point, your reviewer has a small confession. So overcome was I by Latin passion that I fell asleep and missed the scene in which our hero broke his pledge, but I was awake for number 374 ("brilliant spinster, schoolteacher"), and for number 593 ("nothing memorable to report"), and even number 622 ("my heart has more rooms than a whorehouse").

Was it moving? It was not. Nor was it profound. But amid all the pain of promiscuity and the tedium of 600 lovely Latin chests, it was reassuring to discover that having endless fun could be no fun at all. Thank you Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and goodnight.

• On release from Friday at the Dominion, Edinburgh; Cineworld, Edinburgh; and Cineworld Glasgow Renfrew Street