‘Pedro Páramo’: the correction of an impossible adaptation | Culture

Adapting to cinema and spearheading the renewal of Latin American narrative is one of those companies doomed to failure. Nothing new: it is also impossible to transfer it to the screen, although there are attempts to do so, some of them with indelible flashes.

Of Pedro Paramo There are at least two versions prior to this one, the one from 1967, by Carlos Velo, in whose writing he participated, and, 10 years later, , with its almost three hours of duration. The main difficulty was always the same: capturing in images a circular time in which the poor souls of Juan Rulfo’s desert live; make an imaginary place real, heir in its own way to Yoknapatawpha County in , in which an afterlife, close to the fantastic, emerges that traps the reader in a spider web full of voices and ghosts. Pedro Paramo It is a novel about orphanhood and the search for origin whose legendary beginning —”I came to Comala because they told me that my father, a certain Pedro Páramo, lived here. My mother told me. And I told her that I would come to see him as soon as she died”—opens the version that is now being released by Netflix while the camera dives deep into the earth and into its roots.

Directed by the Mexican – one of the most recognized directors of photography in the current industry, capable of filming in and -, this adaptation is written by the Spaniard, who had been toying with the possibility of directing it himself for some time. Prieto and Gil make up an interesting tandem for a version that is surprising in its writing, much more attentive to the original form of the work than the two previous adaptations. With this material, Prieto illustrates the complex structure of suspended time and voices swayed by the wind of the novel, but, unfortunately, this care remains in the mere translation, without proposing its own place, which ends up destroying the possibility of a deeper audiovisual reading. Only by being deeply personal could the director have shed light on such a universal work.

A few weeks before the premiere also on Netflix of (García Marquez always admitted the enormous echo of Pedro Paramo in his work), it seems obvious that this adaptation is not intended to seduce Rulfo’s readers. Nor, we fear, will it attract new followers to his brief work, perhaps because the literalness of the film paradoxically fails to convey the powerful experimental and poetic character of the text, even though it allows the viewer to believe that they have read the novel without having done so. .

Prieto confronts the shadows of Comala’s murmurs, narrated by Juan Preciado, the son who returns looking for his father, with the bright light of the past, in which that sought-after parent is presented as a Ciudadano Kane of the rural Mexican world crossed by his own Rosebud: Susana San Juan, his childhood love. It is that story and its colorful realistic handles (with some unnecessary addition in the form of a half-erotic dream in black and white) that finally take precedence over the rest, reducing the story to its most obvious plot, that impossible love that flies over the totem pole. of the great chief, whose “living resentment” does not fully emerge, although the actor Manuel García Rulfo magnetically embodies the great patriarch.

In the sixties, after writing the feature film The golden roosterscripted by Fuentes and , and the experimental medium-length films The dispossession y The secret formulaRulfo expressed his disenchantment with his country’s cinema, calling it “mechanical,” “with cardboard sets.” The new version of his novel does not feel like cardboard – the production design, the visual effects or the soundtrack prevent this – but it is mechanical, with a lustrous color that makes one miss the anthropological mystery of the man and his Rolleiflex camera. . In short, a correct set that perhaps for this very reason ends up clashing with the dusty sadness that the poetics of Rulfo and his faceless ghosts transmit.