It’s rather a lot. And as its title guarantees, there may be certainly 100 years of it. Anybody who has stumbled throughout a replica of the ebook in a bookstore (or was fortunately compelled to learn it as a part of their training) can inform you why it prevented adaptation for thus lengthy. For years, Márquez steadfastly refused to promote the rights to his ebook, believing that no movie might seize the complete scope of it. He was proper to take action. What Márquez couldn’t have anticipated, nonetheless, is that one other medium would quickly show to be a pure match for his sprawling epic.
Márquez died in April 2014, simply because the media panorama was altering considerably. Due to the rise of Netflix and comparable streaming companies, visible storytelling not got here together with the capitalistic restraints of auditorium area in film theaters or full-season episode counts for TV exhibits. In principle, that technological flexibility permits for a narrative to change into no matter it must be: whether or not that be a conventional two-hour film, a well-recognized TV procedural, or any mixture that presents a single coherent narrative in chapters.
After all, the truth of streaming hasn’t at all times lived as much as the promise of it. Slightly than exploiting the varied formatting potential, streaming algorithms have more and more locked them into distinct patterns. Maybe you’ve noticed that each Netflix documentary enterprise has arbitrarily change into a docuseries with exactly three episodes every. Equally, different streaming companies have arbitrarily picked an episode rely for dramas (eight for Prime Video titles and 10 or 13 for Hulu choices) and caught with them. None of that is to say the irritating phenomenon of the careless 3 a.m. ET launch occasions that rob properties of any sense of pleasure.
However even when streaming is at its algorithmic worst, it carries with it the potential of turning into house to a narrative that might in any other case be homeless. And that seems to be exactly what has occurred with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not solely is that this two-season, 16-episode collection a technically and creatively-stunning achievement, it’s onerous to think about the way it might have existed inside every other context.
There isn’t a model of a One Hundred Years of Solitude film that works. Any quantity of cuts for time to Márquez’ masterwork could be felony. Equally, a extra typical miniseries presentation on a community would show fruitless as nicely. Márquez’ textual content is splendidly immune to wise timelines and narratives. Time accelerates or slows down as wanted in Macondo, with the ultimate pages of the novel feeling as thought they happen immediately. A 16-episode streaming title that operates each episodically and serially has important extra wiggle room to make such a sense of temporal displacement work.
After all, none of streaming’s benefits would matter if Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude weren’t equal components technically proficient and respectful of Márquez’ authentic imaginative and prescient. Fortunately, this title is each. The collection was filmed in collaboration with the author’s household, who offered Netflix the rights in 2019. It was shot solely in Colombia, with Colombian actors, and in Spanish. The occasions of the collection hew as intently to the novel as attainable, which isn’t at all times the proper transfer for an adaptation however is certainly the one path to take with this one.