‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Part II review: A stunning, inevitable climax

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A still from ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Part II. | Photo Credit: NETFLIX

Leonard Cohen sings of having “to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail” in ‘Last Year’s Man,’ indicating one of the ways to consume this gorgeous adaptation of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude .

At the end of the feature-length finale, the only thing to do is to go to the beginning and watch the 16 magnificent episodes all over again. The novel also prompts a similar desire — by the time you come to the end of the magic realism masterpiece and “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”, you want to go right back to the beginning and “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

The series, made with the blessings of the Márquez estate, makes a crucial change from the novel by starting at the end with a dead, bloodied pregnant woman, a ruined town, carnivorous ants, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Through 16 episodes, we see seven generations of the Buendía family repeat the mistakes and tragedies of those who have come before until “the city of mirrors” that José Arcadio Buendía (Diego Vásquez) had founded “has become a city of mirages.”

On first reading, you keep referring to the family tree and try to keep the many Aurelianos and José Arcadios in order, while trying to follow a linear storyline, but then you realise that this is not the point of the book, though it meticulously follows time while simultaneously bending it to return to the beginning, the middle, or the end.

After starting at the end with Melquíades (Moreno Borja) drawing the Ouroboros (a serpent eating its tail), indicating a map of the story for lazy viewers, the series goes back to the beginning. Part II tells of Colonel Aureliano’s (Claudio Cataño) disillusionment and withdrawal from life and of future generations of the Buendías loving the wrong people and principles and dying for their troubles.

The delusional Fernanda del Carpio (Margarita Rosa) tries to order her children’s lives with dreams of her son becoming the Pope and her daughter, Renata Remedios (Juanita Molina), playing the clavichord. Naturally, nothing goes according to her plans.

Remedios the Beauty (Yiseth Garcerant) ascends into heaven while folding sheets. José Arcadio Segundo (Julián Román) brings the railways to Macondo, and also plays an important role in the banana rebellion. Renata falls in love with a mechanic at the banana company, Mauricio Babilonia (David Palacio) and has a child by him, Aureliano Babilonia.

By the time we reach the final episode, we have Aureliano Babilonia (Sebastián Osorio) living like a hermit while trying to decipher the Sanskrit texts left behind by Melquíades.