Chronicle of a death foretold
DAVID GRANT CENTURIES OF ruthless exploitation, first by the Spanish and Portuguese colonialists and later by successive imperialist powers, have seen the peoples of South America literally worked to death, annihilated by force of arris, starved as slaves, brutalised and crushed by wage-slavery, "disappeared" in their thousands as opponents of regimes bequeathed and supporred by imperalism. Acceptance of death on such a scale as an inevitable. commonplace occurance has become woven into South American culture and socicty to the point where it seems natural and immutable.
The novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are saturated with the inevitability this provokes at the level of social 40 conscinusness: peopled with
Rupert Everett and Ornella Muti in 'Chronicle of a death foretold' characters whose faralism, predictive powers. surreal confusion of history and current reality combine with a stoic resistance to the life:
which has conspired to confront them. His detached objectivity borders on a lack of compassion for people whose lives are a living hell.
Bur it is precisely this objectivity which is the political strength of Garcia
Marqucz's writings. His characters make history, but not in circumsrances of their own choosing The ideas and institutions which constrict and crush them are thosc of the church, the srate, a borrowed compradore ideology of the
"local ruling lasses — a savage combination, cynically exploitative where not still mystically feudal. The emotional turmoil of his.
characters is made all the more real by his sharp-edged obvity, Marquca's characters never resolve the contradictions of their lives through individual effort.
Strange then that director
Francesco Rosi should transform the rich and complex raw material of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
Chronicle of a Dealh Fordold into a rarher disappointing film. The use of a derective format scen in Rosi's previous films and the eminently cinemaric qualities of the Colombian location should have combmed with the theme of Marquez's nuve! - the compliciry of a whole village in a murder for "honour" - to great effect.
The film could have been a searing indictment of the valocs which caused the social paralysis that allows the death -so forctold that even the victim knew of it — to occur. Unfortunately, it is politically solt. Many of the biting observations from characters in the novel are absent from, or lack significance in, the film. Most importantly, the complexity of the erotions and motivations of Marquez's women characters are flartened into predictable (and therefone somewhat reactionary) stercutypes.
Thus, Angela Vicario, the woman whose 'bonour" is "redeemed" through murder and death is seen in a vicious fight with her sisters. This is in marked contrast to the passage in Marquez's novel which sees Angela and her sisters discussing ways in włuch she can tilise the predictably drunken stare of her future husband to keep her secrel love allair hidden.
Yer the film opens promisingly enough. A paddle steamer chugs slowly away from a glass-fronted cityscape. Slow cracking shots follow the steamer on 1ts journey up the sluggish river — black smoke belching into a harsh white sky. The music carries an uminous note as the sicamer approaches the village — isolated in space and time - a microcosm of the contineat in which the tragedy is to be played out. The river and its human cargo are the only source of change for a town that 'never changes'
But the film lacks the savage irony of the novel and even goes for an ending which is ambiguously close to happyFans of Rosi and Marquez will be disappointed Those who have still to discover their respective work should not let this film prejudice them in secking it out.
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