As cold and flu season approaches, it’s “Cholera” that you really need to watch out for right now. All the more disastrous given the prestige background of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” today’s feature film adaptation of one of the quintessential and most beloved pieces of Latin American literature of all time festers in nearly every aspect.
It uses mostly Latino actors speaking English with heavy Spanish accents in hopes that this nod alone is enough to signify a genuine sense of native ethnicity. But the bland whitewash fails to capture the specific sense of time (late 1800s to early 1900s) and place (a storybook South American port city), or the cultural trademark of magical realism that made Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel such a sensation in the late 1980s and beyond. It was filmed on location in Columbia; it looks as if it came out of a stock Hollywood backlot.
