Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It’s not all about butterflies and levitation. Some people I know recoil at the mention of the fictional mode “magical realism”: perhaps it’s that word “magical”, with its connotations of twinkling tweeness. But a new TV adaptation of the sacred text of Latin American magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, shows that the genre can be earthier than it is often given credit for — and that “realism” is essential to the equation.Published in 1967, García Márquez’s book is the sprawling chronicle of an apocryphal Colombian community, Macondo — and an origin myth for modern Colombia itself. A new Spanish-language Netflix series in two parts — with the eight episodes of part one premiering this month — tackles the novel’s intricacies with intoxicating brio, but also with commendable narrative and stylistic level-headedness. In the first four episodes supplied for preview, we don’t yet meet Mauricio Babilonia, the character who is permanently surrounded by a flight of yellow butterflies. But we do see a sack of bones that shift and clatter of their own accord, and the omnipresent ghost of a man killed by the Buendía family’s founding patriarch, José Arcadio: this haunting triggers the migration that will lead to the birth of Macondo.The late literary critic Fredric Jameson thought the term “magical realism” should be done away with. For him, the Latin American strain of such fiction was grounded in the concrete complexities of political history. “No magic, no metaphor,” he said of One Hundred Years, “just a bit of grit caught in transcendence, a materialist sublime.” A similar view was expressed by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who in 1949 spoke of the “marvellous real”. Dismissing European surrealism as mere contrivance, Carpentier said that the truly marvellous could be observed directly in South American history and culture, in their contradictions, juxtapositions and extremities.The Netflix series is directed by Alex García López from Argentina, whose extensive TV credits include Misfits, Fear the Walking Dead and Star Wars spin-off The Acolyte; and Laura Mora, a Colombian who enjoyed art-house acclaim for her features Killing Jesus and The Kings of the World. What is remarkable about the show, with its predominantly Colombian cast, is how intensely grounded it is in the everyday — and how commendably non-precious. What dazzles is the richly detailed production design in every shot, and the exuberantly weaving camera choreography that follows characters in and out of houses and through Macondo as it expands from encampment to village to town. The series captivates with its intensely tangible evocation of time, place and, occasionally, sweaty sex. And the supernatural is handled lightly: at one point, a levitating cradle is casually pulled back down, almost as a humorous aside.The Netflix Hundred Years is part of a current mini-revival of the Latin American magical realist repertoire. Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo’s revered Mexican novel of 1955, was an inspiration for García Márquez; it too is now on Netflix in a feature-length adaptation directed by esteemed Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie). Prieto is faithful to the structure of Rulfo’s disorienting, fragmented narrative set in a ghost town; as past and present constantly intermingle, it is never entirely clear who is alive, who is dead. But the film falls far short of catching the original’s transfixing strangeness.Also new, but winning critical acclaim, is a Mexican-made HBO series based on Laura Esquivel’s bestseller Like Water for Chocolate, previously adapted as a feature in 1992. Directed by Alfonso Arau, that international hit came to define female-centred magical realism, but its energies were indeed watered down by a cosy focus on cuisine and romantic passion. Yes, history and politics were involved, but what everyone remembers is the episode of erotically triggered spontaneous combustion, and the lashings of foodie kitsch. Arau’s film showed how magical realism too easily became a recipe to be reworked and diluted. Similarly formulaic was Bille August’s 1993 adaptation of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits — the film was an insipid mess of ghosts, portents and telekinesis which one critic dubbed “Like Water for Decaf”.Versions, or near-neighbours, of magical realism in writing appeared throughout the 20th century. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (substantially written in the 1930s but not published until three decades later) depicted the Devil’s arrival in Moscow accompanied by a gun-toting black cat, drawing on the Russian fantastic tradition represented by Gogol, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Its latest screen adaptation was released this year: a Russian-produced blockbuster directed by an American, Michael Lockshin, with a cast including German actor August Diehl as the Devil and Denmark’s Claes Bang as Pontius Pilate. Critically lauded and a huge box-office hit in Russia, it has also been condemned there by Putin supporters for its “unpatriotic” depiction of a writer facing state censorship, as Bulgakov himself did.Also pre-empting García Márquez in 1959 was Günther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, with its Danzig-set tale of a child who refuses to grow up and protests against the adult condition over several decades with his prodigious shriek. Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation shared the Cannes Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now, and is remembered for the ferocious performance of its young lead, David Bennent, and for making a generation of film-goers phobic about eels. And in the UK, Angela Carter fused elements of magical realism with her own feminist re-exploration of the fairytale canon, collaborating with Neil Jordan on his 1984 feature adaptation of her story The Company of Wolves.Today, magical realism in literature continues to evolve worldwide, in the work of such contemporary novelists as Salman Rushdie (whose Midnight’s Children was filmed by Deepa Mehta in 2012), Haruki Murakami, Olga Tokarczuk and Argentine writers Mariana Enríquez and César Aira. In cinema, however, it’s harder to pin down what magical realism is — or ideally could be. Many films have erred on the side of preciousness; the magic becomes mechanical, with facile apparitions engineered to make them superficially appear the stuff of complex metaphor. When it comes to raiding the standard thematic prop closet, beware of levitation and telekinesis (Emir Kusturica’s 1988 The Time of the Gypsies) and of weird fish (a flying halibut in the same director’s Arizona Dream). What’s required is genuine miracle, and that demands simplicity. Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is a signal offender with his laboured flourishes of the outré — as witness the special-effects apparition unveiled at the climax of his latest film Parthenope (released in the UK next year). By contrast, the flamingoes that suddenly appear on a rooftop in modern-day Rome in Sorrentino’s 2013 The Great Beauty exude a genuine aura of revelation — in part, paradoxically, because they are so transparently a CGI confection.What makes for magic realism in the proper Marquezian sense is perhaps a very particular set of criteria: the magic should be lyrical, poetically affirmative, rather than nightmarish; and, offsetting any temptation of coyness, it needs to be grounded in the political real, as harsh as that may be. Some Hollywood films have attempted this, but often their real subject becomes their own technological panache: David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which we can hardly see past the digital wizardry of Brad Pitt’s de-ageing. By contrast, Jonathan Demme’s 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s ghost story Beloved and Barry Jenkins’ 2021 mini-series based on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad hit the right note between imagination and reality through concentrating on the original texts’ use of fantasy and metaphor that stem directly from the rigours of Black American history.Filmmakers should also remember the matter-of-fact approach that García Márquez proposed: “To tell the story with an imperturbable tone, with infallible serenity . . . avoiding the frivolous and the truculent alike.” So who are today’s authentic practitioners of cinematic magical realism? One is Argentine: erstwhile “slow cinema” realist Lisandro Alonso. His 19th-century travelogue Jauja (2014) takes an unexpected sideways step in its last moments, as strange as those of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; his recent Eureka makes similar jumps of time, space and genre. Then there are the uncanny, non-human apparitions conjured by Thai maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul — notably in 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives, the eeriness underwritten by Thailand’s modern history of border conflict.We certainly get a potent sense of the “marvellous real” from Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher. Her films Happy as Lazzaro and recent art-house hit La Chimera reinvent the tradition of Italian neo-realism, infusing it with time travel and absurdity, but are firmly rooted in hard-edged themes: the economic crisis of rural Italy, the commercial exploitation of the nation’s classical past.The real hits harder still in the films of French-Senegalese director Mati Diop: first in 2019’s Atlantics, in which Dakar is haunted, quite literally, by the ghosts of young men who have died at sea trying to sail to Europe; and in her recent documentary Dahomey, in which the statue of a Beninese king, looted during colonial wars, muses aloud as it is repatriated to Africa.This year has even brought us that rarity, a piece of British magical realism: Andrea Arnold’s Bird. Yes, it centres around the whimsical figure of an otherworldly man-child with a tendency to metamorphosis, but set against the raucous, grungy realism of a depiction of working-class and marginal life in the last place you would think of as a modern-day Macondo — Gravesend, Kent. As Fredric Jameson’s formula has it, grit and transcendence.‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is on Netflix from December 11
