It’s lots. And as its title guarantees, there may be certainly 100 years of it. Anybody who has stumbled throughout a duplicate of the guide in a bookstore (or was fortunately compelled to learn it as a part of their training) can let you know why it averted adaptation for thus lengthy. For years, Márquez steadfastly refused to promote the rights to his guide, believing that no movie might seize the total 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 providers, visible storytelling now not got here together with the capitalistic restraints of auditorium house in film theaters or full-season episode counts for TV exhibits. In concept, that technological flexibility permits for a narrative to turn into no matter it must be: whether or not that be a standard two-hour film, a well-recognized TV procedural, or any mixture that presents a single coherent narrative in chapters.
After all, the fact of streaming hasn’t all the time lived as much as the promise of it. Moderately than exploiting the various formatting potential, streaming algorithms have more and more locked them into distinct patterns. Maybe you’ve noticed that each Netflix documentary enterprise has arbitrarily turn into a docuseries with exactly three episodes every. Equally, different streaming providers 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 residence to a narrative that will 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 sequence a technically and creatively-stunning achievement, it’s laborious to think about the way it might have existed inside some other context.
There is no such thing as a model of a One Hundred Years of Solitude film that works. Any quantity of cuts for time to Márquez’ masterwork can be legal. Equally, a extra typical miniseries presentation on a community would show fruitless as nicely. Márquez’ textual content is splendidly proof against smart timelines and narratives. Time quickens or slows down as wanted in Macondo, with the ultimate pages of the novel feeling as thought they happen instantly. 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 elements technically proficient and respectful of Márquez’ unique imaginative and prescient. Fortunately, this title is each. The sequence was filmed in collaboration with the author’s household, who offered Netflix the rights in 2019. It was shot completely in Colombia, with Colombian actors, and in Spanish. The occasions of the sequence hew as carefully to the novel as potential, which isn’t all the time the fitting transfer for an adaptation however is definitely the one path to take with this one.
