Series “100 Years of Solitude” – honest film adaptation of a myth

Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to experience the ice.” Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “100 Years of Solitude” begins with this sentence, one of the most famous in world literature, as does the series adaptation of this 500-page classic produced by Netflix.

The film adaptation, which is scheduled to last two seasons with eight episodes each, the first half of which is now available, adheres to the novel almost too stoically, not to say conservatively, but struggles to do justice to the literary myth. Márquez’s novel, published in 1967, is ultimately characterized above all by its idiosyncratic, stylistically unique narrative pull, which can hardly be translated into film in this form.

Latin American literature is playing a big role at Netflix right now. At the beginning of November, “Pedro Páramo”, the film adaptation of another classic of magical realism with a Latin American influence, was added to the streaming provider’s program. But the series “100 Years of Solitude” goes beyond previous dimensions and is one of the most expensive Latin American film productions of all time.

Reproducing the plot of Márquez’s best-selling novel, which has sold 50 million copies worldwide, is not that easy. The distant relatives José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales), who live in a Colombian village, marry against their parents’ wishes, embark on years of wandering and found the village of Macondo somewhere in the jungle, the story of which will be told for decades . Her male descendants, who are alternately called Aurelio or Arcadio, as well as various daughters experience how Macondo becomes a city and connects to the world.

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This microcosm serves as an allegory of Latin American history involving discovery, conquest, colonization, civil wars, and imperialism. The founder of the village, José Arcadio Buendía, is also an inventor and experiments, among other things, with alchemy. The jungle village of Macondo with its anecdotal, interlocking stories becomes a magnifying glass for rural myths, a seemingly magical science, but also slowly emerging state institutions and the social conflicts that revolve around them, in which a lot of fantasy is always mixed in.

Dead people rise again or ghost through the village, which is slowly becoming a city, which at some point also becomes a banana plantation for a US company and of course ultimately goes under after various political turmoil. The series packs this into lavishly produced images with a huge array of actors and extras. The two directors Laura Mora and Alex García López took a total of almost 16 hours to realize this meandering epic, which sometimes seems like an unmanageable endless loop because of the constantly repeating names.

Every now and then the film adaptation, which was shot entirely in Colombia and develops its own pull, seems almost too aseptic. Gabriel García Márquez, who died in 2014, always resisted filming the novel during his lifetime. But with the current hype surrounding expensively produced series that often adapt material that is considered unfilmable, such as Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy on Apple TV+, even “100 Years of Solitude” is experiencing a film adaptation.

Of course, this also offers an opportunity to question this very heteronormative story again with regard to its gender roles, especially since Márquez was repeatedly criticized for the latent sexism in his work. The world premiere of the first season took place at a film festival in early December in Cuba, a country to which Gabriel García Márquez, who was also a friend of Fidel Castro, always felt connected.

“100 Years of Solitude” can be seen on Netflix.

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