But in truth, Gabo said many things, and often they were purposefully contradictory. He loved hanging out with Hollywood stars—he visited Robert Redford at the Sundance Institute, and Francis Ford Coppola once cooked pasta at his house in Havana—even as he declined to sell the rights to his masterwork to luminaries including William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, and Dino De Laurentis. There is, however, an obscure Japanese adaptation from 1981. Shortly after Gabo’s death in 2014, I asked his agent, the legendary Carmen Balcells, if there would ever be a true and full adaptation of the novel. Her answer was absolute: “He never wanted a film made of One Hundred Years. And even today it’s a desire respected by his family—which I think will be upheld forever.” His children have a different recollection of their father’s wishes. “He was always a little tempted to make the books into movies,” says García Barcha, but “he said no so many times that the offers disappeared.”
Gabo’s widow, Mercedes, died in 2020, so now all decisions are in the hands of García Barcha and his brother, Gonzalo. “Gabo said to us that once he was dead, we could do whatever we wanted,” García Barcha says. “ ‘Just don’t bother me.’ ” Such a proclamation sounds to me like the lapidary phrases that Gabo would give to one of his characters. The author’s son follows up with one of his own: “It is the living that have to make decisions.”
The brothers have been criticized in some quarters for allowing the Netflix adaptation and for the recent publication of Until August, an unfinished novel that Gabo, already suffering from advanced dementia, had ordered to be destroyed. The book has had mixed reviews: mostly glowing and respectful in Colombia, terrible in the United States. “When I read that we are being greedy, I feel sad for a few minutes, but ultimately these are the decisions we have to make,” says García Barcha.
In 2018, Ramos, who had just been appointed to his new post at Netflix, was ready to take the streamer’s Latin American offerings to another level. Netflix’s philosophy of going local had already proven effective worldwide: The Crown is British. Squid Game is South Korean. Money Heist is Spanish. The House of Flowers is Mexican. It was time to replicate this formula in South American countries. (Narcos takes place in Colombia and Mexico, but it’s a Netflix US production.) The idea of adapting One Hundred Years started to float around in corporate meetings, and it stuck. Ramos ran with it—but first he had to negotiate with Mercedes, who was still part of the estate’s decision-making at the time. Gabo’s family demanded that the series be as long as the story required, that it be in Spanish, and that it be filmed in Colombia. Gabo’s sons came on board as executive producers.
Macondo was built near Ibagué, a town in the Andes. It’s far from the Caribbean, but it has a similar mountainous topography to the area around Aracataca, where the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta cascade into the sea. Eugenio Caballero (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Bárbara Enríquez (Roma) have designed the sets, so Macondo-in-the-Andes promises to be gorgeous. On set, as in the novel, Macondo transforms from a settlement of straw-roofed huts for 20 families into a full-blown town. It’s all been built in human scale. You can walk around the Buendía house, the pharmacy, the bar, and the market.
Some of Gabo’s most ardent fans will be wary of seeing characters that have lived in their imaginations for the last six decades. “I don’t want Netflix to tell me what Colonel Aureliano Buendía looks like,” says Colombian-born Gustavo Arango, a professor of literature and author of two books about García Márquez. “I’ve always imagined he looks like my grandfather. As every Colombian has.”
But when I’m shown some early footage in Bogotá, I enjoy seeing those faces in locations that, to me, seem out of a biblical Colombia. I recognize the arrival of Melquíades, the gypsy who disturbs the idyllic hamlet when he appears with his impressive magnet and his magnifying glass; and the advent of Rebeca, the child that eats earth with her hands. I enjoy the anger with which the Buendía patriarch receives the government official who comes to his front door thinking he can tell the people of Macondo what to do. The costumes are elaborate, every detail perfectly curated. The actors all have amazing faces. There are no stars in the production, although many are respected local actors, including Claudio Cataño as Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Marleyda Soto as the older Úrsula Iguarán, and Diego Vásquez as the older José Arcadio Buendía. The nonactors prepared by attending theater workshops.
Like the novel, the One Hundred Years series is sparing with dialogue. “It’s certainly not Succession,” says Alex García López, the principal director, on a video call from Barcelona. (Some of the one-liners I hear are memorable, however: When Úrsula Iguarán gives birth to her first child, “he is born with women’s buttocks.”) García López also tells me that the series won’t be like the “phantasmagorical Harry Potter when a ghost shows up and there’s a halo and the music goes up.” That answers the magical realism question: Netflix isn’t interested in flashy (and expensive) special effects.
The directing is split between two Latin Americans. García López was born in Argentina and has ample experience working on big American productions, including a few Marvel series. The other director is Colombian-born writer-director Laura Mora, who has a long-standing relationship with Netflix and whose films, The Kings of the World and Killing Jesus, have earned festival acclaim. The directors’ styles couldn’t be more different. García López is vertiginous—“I wanted a lot of movement, I wanted to capture the chaos”—where Mora is contemplative: “I’m a cinema purist.” García López shoots from above; Mora from a more intimate perspective. García López mentions Kusturica and Terrence Malick. Mora references Fellini and Lucrecia Martel. “I think they chose us because we are so different,” says Mora on a video call from her native Medellín, “and because we are a good complement.”
They also reflect the two different histories within the novel. One Hundred Years offers a metaphorical history of civilization in the largest sense, as well as the more specific story of Colombia and the Caribbean. The book never actually mentions dates and it plays with time. This adaptation—conceived by José Rivera, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries—is linear and closely pegged to what happened in Colombia between 1850 and 1950. García López, perhaps because he is not Colombian, sees the universal message about the failure of societies. Mora highlights the tragedy of Colombia and the country’s inability to find a way to live together after a century of violence. Both directors are quick to point out that their adaptation will be as demanding as the novel. “It is not light entertainment,” says Mora, who compares it to the tone and scope of Killers of the Flower Moon. “It deals with big, strong themes. A complex universe.”
The family’s skill at storytelling, Gabo Gabo tells me, stemmed from a long-standing tradition during which everybody would sit around and tell and retell the history of their immediate family and its ancestors. “I can identify each one of my aunts and uncles in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he says. His grandmother was unimpressed by how Gabo, who usually only listened during those storytelling sessions, recycled real-life family tales in his fiction. She always said that she preferred her daughter, Aida Rosa, who was a nun, to her son, who was a Nobel Prize winner.
Celis can also be critical of her literary hero. “That I criticize his portrayal of the women does not mean I don’t admire the author or that I dismiss the importance of his work,” she says. In One Hundred Years, Remedios Moscote is nine years old when she is spotted by her Buendía suitor, is married right after her first menstruation, and dies right before giving birth to twins. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Florentino Ariza takes a 12-year-old girl as his lover while he waits for Fermina, the love of his life, to give in to him. When she finally does, he abandons her. América Vicuña, at 14, kills herself. “When I realized that I had read and loved that book as a teenager,” says Celis, “and had not seen the abuse of América Vicuña, I sobbed.”
