Adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude into a film seems like an incredibly difficult task for two main reasons
In the timeless city of Macondo, seven generations of the Buendía family navigate love, oblivion, and the inevitability of their past and their destiny. This is Netflix’s most expensive Latin American project to date, with Colombian groups and indigenous communities creating the sets and props for the series.
Sometimes this fusion is so intense that it seems impossible to separate the two
First, the novel belongs to a specific literary movement, pioneered by South American writers, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, where the story is told through a fusion of reality and fantasy. Of course, translating such scenes into cinema risks becoming absurd and not achieving a satisfactory cinematic form.
The second reason is the inherent complexity of the novel
However, watching the first episode of One Hundred Years of Solitude showed that the creators managed to convey this magical and surreal feeling to the audience without it being funny. One Hundred Years of Solitude is challenging to read due to the repeated use of identical names for different characters, as well as the nonlinear narrative and frequent disruptions to the timeline.
These elements can wear the reader down
Fortunately, such problems are absent in the series, which successfully transformed the nonlinear narrative into a linear one, allowing it to establish a strong connection with the audience. No need to waste time endlessly scrolling – here’s the entire lineup of new movies and TV shows streaming on Netflix this month.