One Hundred Years of Solitude–An Alternative Universe?

One Hundred Years Of Solitude  (1967) by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a masterpiece of magical realism, telling the story of  seven generations of the Buendía family.  Sprawling over a century, the tragic circumstances in a utopian conceived town–Macondo–are revealed, where isolation as a community at first protects them from conflict and greed.      But the Buendía family cannot escape its fate: the curse of generations of love, betrayal, and forbidden sex. 

In the opening scene (to be bookended at the end of the eight-episode Netflix series)  Colonel Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cataño) faces a firing squad. Flashing back to the time  when his father introduced ice to his village,  he reflects on his family’s history and his cousins’ establishment of Macondo, where they had hoped to escape the pain and suffering of the outside world.  However, the characters’ maturity from childhood to adulthood (requiring different actors) occasionally makes it difficult to comprehend the narrative from one generation to the next.

In addition, there are problems with pacing, as the magical realism–including flying objects and dream sequences,– is a coherent whole primarily for those who have read the book.  Very closely adhering to the author’s vision, the scenes are mostly dynamic crises for those who can see how one family member is imprisoned by the fate of another, including having intimate relations with a lover who may also be a parent, unbeknownst to either lover.

Filmed in Colombia in Spanish, with an entirely local cast, this is a miraculous feat of film production.  Highly complex characters, speaking in Spanish, often with two actors playing the same family member–one for the child and one for the adult–are impressively fleshed out but require great effort to truly understand the many subplots.  Only one-third of the novel is represented in this first season but, at least for this reviewer, a second viewing and perhaps a re-reading of the novel are  needed to understand the drama more clearly.  

Availability:  Netflix

Note:  One Hundred Years of Solitude deals with issues of child marriage, rape, and government collusion that are fundamentally reprehensible yet not portrayed as such.