Common wisdom says that the movie business is suffering from a shortage of good scripts.
So it was only a matter of time before someone went back 3,000 years in search of good idea for the next big thing.
Director Jorge Ali Triana is distinguished for having made the Gabriel García Márquez-scripted Tiempo de morir (Time to Die) in 1986, and this is where Edipo Alcalde plays its ace - the Edipo Alcalde project was 1982 Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez' idea.
García Márquez sat down with Stella Malagón and Orlando Senna and came up with a script that relocates Sophocles in a strife-torn 20th-century Colombia. The Plague of Thebes is here replaced by a general state of violence, while Oedipus, played by the versatile Cuban Jorge Perugorría (Strawberry and Chocolate), becomes the mayor of a town where he is trying to make peace between freedom-fighting guerrillas, drug cartels, paramilitary organisations, landowners and the government, while still trying to protect a civilian population.
To add to his problems - and I'm not giving too much away here - the Mayor becomes his mother's husband and his brother's father, as well as a metaphor for Latin America's inability to find peace. This is the kind of tragic vision of a continent that must make the tourist authorities quake in their boots, and the sort of epic material (literally epic, for once) that necessitates a writer of García Márquez' calibre to animate.
Good composers borrow, the adage goes, while great composers steal; the same is true of scriptwriters. After all, when you think about it, Hollywood has been quietly borrowing from Sophocles for years.
It's tragic really - tragic that it's taken so long. Edipo Alcalde (Oedipus the Mayor), which receives its world premiere just before noon today, is a major Colombia/ Mexico/Spain co-production, shot entirely on location in the cities and countryside of Colombia, with a diamond-studded international cast that includes Buñuel veterans Angela Molina and Paco Rabal (Spain), as well as Puerto Rican Miriam Colón (who featured in Bille August's The House of the Spirits) and Colombia's Jairo Camargo.
Jonathan Holland
Prod Co: Producciones Amaranta in co-production with Grupo de Colombia, Caracol Television, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografiá, Tabasco Films, Sogotel
Prod: Jorge Sánchez
Dir: Jorge Ali Triana
Scr: Gabriel García Márquez, Stella Malagon, Orlando Senna
Ph: Rodrigo Prieto
Prod des: José Luis Aguilar
Mus: Blas Emilio Alehortúa
Ed: Sigfrido Barjau
Cast: Jorge Perugorría, Angela Molina, Francisco Rabal, Jairo Camargo, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Miriam Colón
Running time: 100mins
International sales: Latina
