Plans to Film Novel About Pedophile Draws Group’s Ire

Plans to film the movie based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” are meeting stiff resistance in Mexico for a group that advocates against the sexual exploitation of women and girls.

The Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean, filed a criminal complaint with the Mexico’s Attorney General’s office last week, the Associated Press reported.

The group claims that the movie would help promote pedophilia in the region.

It’s easy to see why the group would find the film offensive.

The story is told from the point of view of a 90-year-old-man who decides to celebrate his birthday by going to a brothel and having sex with a 14-year-old virgin. He asks the brothel’s owner to find a girl and drug her so she does not resist his advances.

Book’s Tone. This quotation from the book on Wikipedia seems to capture the book’s general tone:

In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin. We do not waste away with time; time is a tool that carves away our excess, like a chisel chips away marble to reveal a work of art.

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay … by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once … My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist … and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness.

This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were … That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.

The comatose girl ends up being his first love. Several reviews of the book, which came out in 2005 are here.

Filming began in Puebla, but the Mexican state announced that it would not help to finance the $8 million production, the Huffington Post reported. But the same story quoted the head of the anti-exploitation group saying that the governments of Spain and Denmark are helping to finance the film.

Orphan Cause. With governments across the world seeking to attract film production companies, it seems unlikely that Puebla’s withdrawal of financial support will stop the film from being made. Even so, denying funds to a film that offends a loud segment of the electorate would seem to make political sense.

If this has happened in the U.S. in recent times, I haven’t heard about it. It seems like a cause that is crying out for conservative politicians.

Sexual trafficking has been a troublesome issue for Mexico. The United Nations now lists Mexico as the number one center for the supply of young children to North America, according to the coalition’s website. While the country is alleged to be a hub of human trafficking, few convictions have been made even after Mexico has conformed its laws to international treaties, IPS reports.