ROSI'S BLACK ORCHID OF VIOLENCE
Author: By Jay Carr, Globe Staff
Date: Tuesday, September 20, 1988
Page: 34
Section: ARTS AND FILM
To make this film of the short novel that won Gabriel Garcia Marquez a
Nobel Prize, Francesco Rosi went to its setting, a moldering village in
Colombia, where the real-life incident on which the drama is based occurred in
1950. Rosi uses the fatal stabbing of a young man by the brother of a woman he
slept with as a departure point for a richly layered meditation on violence of
several sorts, making one man's death seem to crystallize a country's fate.
When the populace gathers like vultures to watch the murder that everyone
but the victim seems to know is coming, there's a trenchant comment on archaic
codes that condone and compel the so-called crime of honor. Rosi finds
striking filmic equivalents of the enchanted fairy-tale quality of Marquez's
writing; there's seductive otherworldliness in his gliding shots of the lush,
deadly jungle. Rosi, who has always known how to depict iron fatalism under a
crushing weight of dark sky, incorporates architecture into his scheme here,
showing graceful 19th-century buildings crumbling before Esso signs.
The spectacle of English-speaking materialism corrupting Latin America is
brought home in the figure of an indolent Englishman who buys a bride, then
rejects her as damaged goods, and crushes the spirit of an old widower by
paying him far more than his house is worth, leaving him bereft of the only
thing of value he has left -- his memories. As the victim, Anthony Delon
projects a privileged fragility and carelessness that become part of the
reason the villagers resent him enough to assume complicity in his death. Rosi
genuflects to Marquez, but takes his own transfiguringly political, economic
and social view of Marquez's fantastic Latin world in this black orchid of a
film.
JCARR ;09/15 NKELLY;09/20,11:48 FESCHRO2
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