It's easy to be sceptical about a visual adaptation of one of the most imaginative, expansive works of 20th-Century literature, one with its own unique, impossible linguistic and narrative logic. How does one translate Gabriel García Máquez's disorienting language of beauty, cruelty and myth into TV? Really well apparently. Netflix's stunning adaption of his magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterwork in production design with a story like nothing you've seen before. An impressive example of what television can be when it doesn't forget its roots as both a visual and narrative art form.
Set for the most part in the fictional town of Macondo, we follow the lives and deaths of the Buendía family through time and space, and the development of Macondo from uninhabited swamp land to an industrious busy town, observing its incessant growth and change with each generation. Death hangs over them like the sword of Damocles' – and shapes their entire lives; its threat, desire and fear. Every vignette brings doubt as to whether the characters may off themselves, someone else, or fight for their right to live with everything they have.
There's much to praise in the show – the surreal and lived-in feel of Macondo, an entirely built set which captures in its textures some of the mystery and materiality of Marquez's worlds – is a true playground for the cinematographers to move around. The camera movements, gliding around the Buendía's family estate, through doors, corridors, courtyards, floating as if propelled forward by a constant wind, levitating around the characters, in and out of their lives, empowered by the same alchemical forces the men of the Buendía family obsess with.
None of the series would work without both the grounding and elevating performances of the ensemble cast, one which changes with each Buendía generation, an array of incredibly watchable faces: from young José Arcadio's constant awe-struck smile, to Aureliano's piercing and fearful gaze, and Rebecca's impressive angular face. If there's a singular reason to stick around and watch the entire piece, it is the constant return to Aureliano's firing squad scene. Introduced in the first episode, its lighting is so sharp, the moustache so commandeering, that you'll be compelled to stick around because death, while always looming, is never quite a guarantee or an ending in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But just like engaging with the original novel might surprise first-time readers of Márquez with the prominence (in fact, centrality) of some of the most distressing themes – an abundance of incest and violence – the show tries to grapple with these difficult subjects with lightness, invoking the elsewhere logic of Macondo and somehow making some of the uncomfortable decisions and dated judgements of our main characters easier to digest. It's in those moments of narrative complexity that the show negotiates the precarious balance between visual realism and magical logic – everything we see is as it was, distressingly familiar and recognisably alien.
To screen a story so specific, intricate and always opaque in which three names are circulated endlessly between dozens of characters; in which minutes, sometimes months, sometimes years, pass from scene to scene, and yet still finding instances of universality in every dusty corner is brave and rare. A story of fate, death, love, the joy and horrors of a world changing incredibly fast – One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tale strictly tied to its fictionality, but holding broken shards of an old mirror up to our TV screens.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: Part 1 is now available on Netflix.
