When the English translation of Gabriel Garcia Marqez’s 1967 Spanish novel came out, he became a literary sensation. The epic that told the story of seven generations of the Buendia family, also took in years of Columbian history and social change, in the writer’s magic realism style. It is too complex a novel to be condensed into a film, and when he was alive, the Nobel Prize-winning author refused to sell the movie rights. The long form of the web series suits the book, and the adaptation, directed by Alex García López and Laura Mora, is just gorgeous to look at, with breathtaking locations and wonderful production design.
The patriarch of the clan,José Arcadio Buendía (Marco Gonzalez as the younger and Diego Vásquez as the older) and his wife Ursula Iguarán (Susana Morales and Marleyda Soto Ríos), leave their village, when the cursed by her mother for marrying her cousin, results in him killing a man in a duel. Haunted by the dead man’s ghost, they leave the village along with close friends and their families, and head towards the sea, but after months of aimless wandering, Buendia decides to settle in one swampy place that he names Macondo. Over the years, the town flourishes, the Buendias have three kids and adopt two. Jose Arcadio falls under the spell of a gypsy, Melquiades (Moreno Borja) and spends all his time and money tinkering in a lab, as Ursula struggles to keep the family together.
Macondo is seen as a primitive but utopian village, untouched by the outside world, except for when the gypsies come visiting, bringing strange things like magnets, ice, and alchemy. Characters are added, the drama intensifies—there’s lust, greed, eccentricity, mental illness and evil. Some of the relationships and scenes (rape, incest) are problematic in today’s times, but in the context of the story and the progression of the plot, they fit in.
Ursula’s mother’s curse, that says the couple’s inbreeding will produce freaks with pigs’ tails does not come true, but the family is touched by tragedy in other ways—mainly doomed relationships, civil war and corruption from beyond the verdant haven of Macondo.
The first eight hour-long episodes cover about a third of the book, eight more episodes are to come. To explain what cannot be shown, there is a narrator who uses words from Marquez’s eloquent prose to nudge the plot forward. The novel is over half a century old, so readers may not remember it, but the series is likely to send the book sales soaring. The book begins with the line, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover” and the reader or viewer is immediately hooked.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Directed by Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Mora,
Cast: Claudio Catano, Diego Vasquez, Marleyda Soto, Vina Machado and others
On Netflix
