“My father, when he was alive, said that if ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ could be filmed in many hours, in Spanish and in Colombia, perhaps he would consider it,” writes Rodrigo García, the filmmaker son of Gabriel Garcia Marquezin the press releases of a series that perhaps Gabo would have approved. The ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Netflix (first part, Wednesday, the 11th) conform to the ideal proposed by the author: it is not a film, but a story expanded into sixteen episodes, spoken in Spanish, filmed entirely in Colombia and with an essentially Colombian crew, and without skimping on resources or efforts to achieve the best, most truthful result possible. As the production designer explains Barbara Enriquez to El Periódico de Catalunya, the long-awaited series is “probably the biggest thing anyone has done in America, at least from the United States on down.”
Its history spans, as the title already indicates and is well known, several generations of the mythical Buendía family and, by extension, several eras in Colombia. The cousins José Arcadio Buendía (Marco Gonzalezat first) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Moralesin principle) they abandon their ranch in search of another horizon, the sea on the other side of the mountains. When their strength is low, they and their adventurous friends decide to create a village in the sleep of a swamp. It will be called Macondo. There a dense skein of stories and history, of love, violence, madness and war will unravel.
The paths of the script
Rewriting one of the greatest masterpieces of universal literature is both a privilege and a responsibility, or to continue citing themes from the work, a curse. The first approach was made by the Puerto Rican Jose Riveranominated for an Oscar for his work in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’. Later, that work was reviewed by a trio of Colombian scriptwriters who led Natalia Santa (‘Green Border’, ‘The Robbery of the Century’) and completed Camila Brugés and Albatros Gonzalez.
The first sentence of the book is completely respected: “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Throughout the series, an omnipresent narrator, Aureliano Babilonia, faithfully rescues the words of García Márquez. But the work of adaptation has been one of reinvention. From the outset, Rivera gave chronological order to a work in which time moves in circles. The writing consultant Maria Camila Arias He was in charge of evaluating Rivera’s work and presenting to the team of screenwriters the need to highlight the most important themes of the book. “Like that violence that goes through the characters and the town. Or the theme of loneliness: how each of the characters ends up prey to their passions and that ends up leaving them alone,” Santa explains to us.
Among the most difficult questions was: how to create dialogues from a text in which, in reality, there are not many of them? “When Gabo puts in dialogues, they are very brilliant, so we built scenes just to get to some little phrase,” says Brugés. “We had to invent the rest. From the few dialogues, we had to decide how each character spoke, whether with very constructed phrases, or whether with monosyllables.. “We looked for the clues and then we did an excavation task.”
A Macondo where to live
No dates are read in the book, but some historical facts are mentioned, such as The Thousand Day War and the banana plantation massacrewhich served to establish a time frame (1850-1950) and thus be able to decide more easily from the objects and accessories of the production design to the materials used in the costumes. It is easily a saying. “We tried to be historically correct and that meant extensive research,” says Enríquez, a production designer. “We grabbed onto many references, paintings, drawings, photographs, to be able to build and design this entire town, all the interiors, all the furniture.”
Although the action was originally set in the Caribbean region, the team found the ideal conditions for production in the department of Tolima, especially in the town of Alvarado. The main ‘set’ has almost 17,000 square meters of construction and about 130 independent buildings, including facades and exterior and interior ‘sets’. Enríquez adds another surprising fact: “Right now that imaginary town has more than sixteen thousand plantsbrought there so that it has vegetation.”
As head of the art team, Enríquez was a bridge who worked a lot with costumes, a department led by Catherine Rodriguez (‘Embrace of the Serpent’, ‘Summer Birds’). “We have made all the garments from scratch, including footwear, accessories, headgear, everything, everything from scratch,” she explains to us. Luckily for the team, in those times, in Colombia, ‘fast fashion’ did not exist. ” I think it is important to understand that Colombia is like a country of prosperity. There are moments and there are spaces in which time stands still until the next good season arrives.. “Many things remain timeless, especially in people who are workers and cannot change their clothes too frequently.”
