Letters From the Park; Miracle In Rome

Made for Spanish television, these two entries from the "Gabriel Garcia Marquez Collection" are winning adaptations of the Nobel-prize winning author's stories. Letters From the Park is based on a section of the author's bestselling Love in the Time of Cholera. Set in Latin America, circa 1913, the story follows the romance of Juan (Miguel Paneque), an errand boy and Maria (Ivonne Lopez), an upper-class girl. Maria is interested in Juan because of his beautifully written love letters. She commissions a local clerk/poet named Pedro (Victor Laplace) to write her responses for her. What she doesn't know is that Victor is also penning Juan's billet-doux. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, this comedic love triangle has an ironic twist: Pedro falls in love with Maria, himself. Philosophic commentary on the nature of love is gently sandwiched between the amiable plot developments in this touching comedy of errors. Miracle in Rome is a haunting tale of a young girl who dies in her father's arms when she's seven, but is exhumed whole twelve years later when plans for a new cemetery require relatives to move the bones of their loved ones. Margarito Duarte (Frank Ramirez) is astonished when he lifts the coffin lid to discover his dead daughter Evelia (Amalia Duque Garcia) looking like she's merely sleeping. The parish priest declares that Evelia is a saint, and sets in motion the procedure for canonization. Since Columbia, a small country, boasts no previous saints, the people are ecstatic. Unfortunately, Margarito, who carries his daughter around in a wooden case, runs smack up against some serious bureaucratic red tape: the Columbian Embassy and the Vatican. Befriended by an aspiring opera singer (Gerardo Arellano), poor Margarito wanders the streets of Rome, lugging his daughter, avoiding Embassy officials, and pleading with entry-level clerks at the Vatican. Just when all seems lost, the father's fervent faith produces its own blossoming miracle, in a beautiful unexpected ending. Both Miracle in Rome and Letters From the Park feature clear, readable subtitles (though in Letters From the Park, the English spellings--"farse" for "farce," etc.--are often atrocious), and both would make excellent additions to the foreign film collections of both university and public libraries. (R. Pitman)