Javier Bardem's starring role in this horrifically boring festival of middlebrow good taste points up a general fact about his career, which the best supporting actor Oscar in the Coen brothers' film No Country for Old Men briefly obscured. He can be a completely terrible actor. With his dreamy, fish-eyed gaze and purring voice, he is unbearably mannered and self-conscious; his mouth is habitually pursed in a little smirk, sometimes archly knowing, sometimes seraphically accepting; it makes you want to slap him.
In No Country For Old Men, everyone thought that his coiffure represented an unbeatable low in screen hair. Wrong. Bardem's moustache in this film, with its dandy little twists at either end, is just as repulsive, but it isn't supposed to be. A string of female co-stars actually have to kiss him while this loathsome thing is nestling on his upper lip, without screeching or throwing up.
Directed by Mike Newell and adapted by Ronald Harwood from Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel, the film is set in late 19th-century Colombia; where cholera becomes a queasy metaphor for the sickness of love. Its hero is moonstruck telegraph operator Florentino, and in Bardem's hands this character becomes one of the most annoying passive-aggressive types imaginable. While still penniless, he falls for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the beautiful daughter of a wealthy but boorish new-money businessman Lorenzo Daza (John Leguizamo). Daza cruelly forbids the match and instead steers her towards cultured, handsome Dr Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). They are married, not very happily, and poor Florentino grows old keeping the flame of love alive in his heart. It is only 50 years later, when Fermina and Florentino are both ancient, that he can put the moves on her.
So far, so adorable. But wait. Florentino hasn't exactly been keeping himself chaste for Fermina, and even given that such a thing wouldn't be reasonable for any normal red-blooded man, this story gives him a startling consolation prize. He becomes an absolute babe magnet. Something in that spaniel-eyed inner hurt has the señoras flinging themselves at him. Florentino is shown getting it on with women, more than 600 by his own self-congratulatory count, who obligingly reveal their breasts to the camera. Even as a frankly revolting oldster - who is now incidentally rich - he is shagging a besotted student a millionth of his age. Who shows us her breasts.
We are expected to sigh and swoon while Florentino finally has his narrative cake and eats it, eventually climbing into bed with Fermina. She also, with much bittersweet hesitation, reveals her breasts. Mezzogiorno is apparently wearing a latex upper-body-frontal nude old lady suit. Dreamy, romantic Florentino, spiritually monogamous even in mortality's shadow, evidently forgives Fermina for not looking as hot as the hundreds of younger women he's been bedding. But we never see his sagging body.
The stately parade of young actors dressed up to look old in period costume at the beginning of a film is a worrying sign of its forthcoming pomposity and conceit: radiating an entirely unearned sense of awe at setting out to tell someone's important life story. This film is plainly supposed to be life-affirming and life-enhancing, a classy literary date movie for the educated classes. It actually looks smug and tacky and dull: a softcore Captain Corelli. A film to be strictly quarantined.