I saw Love in the Time of Cholera yesterday afternoon, which is an adaptation of a book of the same name by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which also happens to my favorite book of all time and, I am fully convinced, a collection of the most beautiful words ever committed to paper. My copy, which is old and yellow and used to belong to my mother when she was young, is too personal for me to loan out. I was so moved by the story that I scrawled love poems of my own in all its margins.
For someone who hasn't read this book, I don't know how the movie will fly. They pulled scenes and conversations and narrations verbatim from the book; Marquez's words are the most beautiful thing about the film, and it's awesome how some things I rushed past while reading here really come to life. Some of the acting is bad, however: Particularly John Leguizamo's painful rendition of Fermina Daza's father. For anyone who has not read this, it's a very complicated story about love that makes you feel like you are in the grasp of a boa constrictor and love that sets you free, sex that helps you find love and sex that helps you escape from love. But it finds its focal point in a lifelong love not realized until the couple is in their '70s, which is very romantic on paper but in film requires a sort of icky old people sex scene that made me cringe.
I think for the first time I realized the soul of Marquez's story, though I have thought I'd found it before and was wrong: Every love is an illusion. It simply depends on which illusions we choose to commit to.
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