Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — an elliptical epic of fate, family, politics and madness in Macondo, a fictional town that represents the wider, tragic history of Colombia and Latin America as a whole — has been made into a Netflix series.
That’s Netflix; the streaming service better known for “Squid Game,” “Tiger King” and the more overpriced works of Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes.
Bad idea, right? Well, to further quote that other prizeworthy wordsmith Olivia Rodrigo, “f—k it, it’s fine.”
More than fine, actually. The first season of this two-part, Spanish-language production can come across at times like a highbrow telenovela. But the sweeping pageant does an impressive job of streamlining García Márquez’s idiosyncratic, discursive novel into an expeditious but still thoughtful, contemplative and, yes, realistically magical eight hours.
The author’s sadness and humor come across intact; the rhythm and tone of his straightforward-yet-poetic prose inform each shot in this handsomely mounted production. The show’s gimlet narration and additional dialogue have been crafted to sound like they could have belonged in the book.
Four writers and a credited consultant worked on the teleplays. García Márquez’s sons, filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo García Barcha, are among the show’s executive producers; they’ve waited decades (what a Macondo thing to do!) to authorize a production of appropriate length, scope and resources.
Filmed entirely in Colombia by Medellin-born director Laura Mora and UK-based Argentinian Alex García López, the season meticulously evokes everything, from costumes to architecture to technological advances, from the Victorian Era it more-or-less parallels (Season 2 will unfold in the early 20th Century). The cinematography favors fast-floating Steadicam cinematography, its viewpoint that of a running child’s or a fool’s. The soundtrack of encroaching jungle noises and threatening winds foreshadows the ultimate fate awaiting Macondo and its founding Buendía family.
The clan’s members are superbly cast from an all-Colombian talent pool. The first one we see is Claudio Cataño’s well-meaning rebel leader turned ruthless raider, Aureliano Buendia. We regard the revolutionary’s Zapata eyes and handlebar mustache while an offscreen narrator recites the novel’s first 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 ice.”
Rewind through the decades to the wedding of said father, José Arcadio Buendia, to his lovely cousin Ursula Iguaran. Folks in their superstitious village warn that their children will be born with pig’s tails; that incestuous concern gets into Ursula’s head and delays consummation. After José kills a rival fighting cock owner for mentioning his conjugal situation, it’s high time to leave. José leads a group of like-minded young people — along with the dead guy’s ghost — through the wilderness in search of an elusive seashore for years, until he has the vision to build Macondo on an isolated stretch of rainforest river.
Marco Antonio González has the right combination of charisma and holy foolishnessl to sell this secular Moses. You believe an irresponsible visionary like this could establish the kind of equity utopia Macondo begins as. González also establishes José’s obsessive, if almost always misconstrued, interest in the wonders that self-proclaimed Gypsy mystic Melquiades (Spanish Roma actor Moreno Borja) brings to the cut-off but growing town: Daguerreotype cameras, the elements of alchemy, that aforementioned ice. When he inevitably goes mad and has to be tied to a chestnut tree in the courtyard, older Jose is played with a distinctive, attentive incoherence by Diego Vasquez; we thoroughly believe he’s the same, childlike guy.
Fed up (but still, forever in love) as her husband cocoons himself in his lab, worrywart Ursula starts a thriving candy animal business to keep the family solvent. Susana Morales is a force of nature as the take-charge younger Ursula; Marleyda Soto is as grounded as Earth itself as the older matriarch, who becomes the moral leader of an increasingly besieged Macondo while her own family wallows in indiscretions, disappointments and other bad choices, likely congenital conditions more troublesome than pig tails.
Beside middle child Aureliano, second generation Buendias are played at various ages by a skilled group of young actors and, as adults: Edgar Vittorino as eldest son Jose Arcadio Jr., who ran off with the gypsies and returns decades later as a tattooed, muscular epitome of machismo: and Loren Sofia Paz as the youngest sibling, Amaranta, a proper lady with some very inappropriate impulses.
Standouts among dozens of other memorable characters include Vina Machado’s Pilar Ternera, a fortune-telling prostitute who has bastards with both shyly twisted Aureliano and his well-endowed brother. One of those children, Arcadio, raised in the Buendia house never knowing his true parentage, finds his real mom hot as an adult, when he’s played brilliantly by Janer Villarreal as a toxic cocktail of resentment and power-drunk incompetence.
Then there’s Rebeca, a cousin of Ursula’s who arrives at the Buendia manor a feral child accompanied by a sack with parents’ bones. She grows into an immensely passionate young woman (Akima) who, when her ardor is thwarted as it often is, reverts to her childhood habit of eating dirt. Maybe that’s why her masturbatory orgasms trigger earthquakes.
Indeed, there’s more romantic craziness here than you’ll see in a month on Telemundo. But if you can find another soap opera that keenly examines both conservative and leftist oppression, economics that have barely evolved beyond feudalism and the often tragic clash between idealism and pragmatism, get that gem on physical media before it disappears.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” also stages excellent military sequences, premonition-haunted dreams and astonishing surreal tableau, such as when the entire populace of Macondo accomplishes great civic improvements, loses its collective memory and finally crashes out together after a bout of infectious insomnia.
Expect much praise of how the series visualizes magical realism with its casual inclusion of levitating priests, empty chairs rocking and snaking rivulets of annunciating blood. But Luis Bunuel was pulling off that kind of thing onscreen before “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published. BTW, there’s also a new adaptation of “Pedro Paramo,” Juan Rulfo’s 1955 MR novel that predated “Solitude” by a dozen years, up on Netflix; it’s not just “Narcos,” this place.
The true magic here lies in how close the adapters come to immersing us in the physical, psychological and topnotch aesthetic reality that Garcia Marquez indelibly imagined.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” premieres Wednesday, Dec. 11, on Netflix.