When becoming an actress, I'm sure that there's a lot of potential roles that a woman dreams about playing. Perhaps she's a bit rough and rockery, and wants to be the ever-stunning Grace Slick. Or maybe she digs philosophy and feminism and wants to take on Simone de Beauvoir. Or maybe a fictional heroines from Wonder Woman to Jane Eyre. Or maybe the terribly scorned and tossed aside mistress of Benito Mussolini?

Variety reports that Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who most recently played Fermina Urbino in Love in the Time of Cholera, is going to play Ida Dalser in Marco Bellocchio's upcoming film, Vincere. (This is the film I told you about here and here.) The production follows Mussolini's Secret by Gianfranco Norelli and Fabrizio Laurenti, and to review, the film focuses on the struggles and abbreviated life of Mussolini's mistress, Dalser. You can't really call her "Mussolini's love," because the woman went through hell. As Benito rose to power, Fascist agents tried to remove all proof of the relationship and Benito's son, so both were sent to asylums where young Benito died from coma-inducing injections, and she died of a brain hemorrhage. Happy ending? Probably not.

Production is finally getting underway in Venice this May.

One of the most beloved literary classics of the 20th century -- and rightfully so -- the 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera by the Colombian-born Gabriel García Márquez made its first cinematic appearance in 2001. In Peter Chelsom's Serendipity, it was the book in which the playful Sara (Kate Beckinsale) wrote her name and phone number, in the hopes that her would-be lover Jonathan (John Cusack) would find it. He spends years searching for it, flipping through every copy of the book that he can find. That movie doesn't have many fans, but I'm fond of it, and in a way, it's truer to the spirit of Márquez's novel than Mike Newell's more straightforward movie adaptation that opens in theaters this week. Whereas Chelsom's film attempted to capture the feel of the novel, Newell's film attempts nothing more than a translation.

That's a big problem right there. The novel was originally written in Spanish, and though the English translation is quite beautiful, it's still a translation. The new movie is filmed in English, so it's an adaptation of a translation. Then, we have a director from England, Mike Newell, who has absolutely no cultural connection to the Caribbean, where the story is set. Of course, no director could perfectly, accurately represent the novel on the screen, but it's possible to start from a slightly better vantage point. On top of that, the story takes place over fifty years, which in a novel is no problem. But in a movie it requires layers of age makeup, a process that, as movie technology gets better and better, seems to get worse and worse (imagine how awful this will look on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray six months from now). And, on an emotional level, stories that cover that kind of immense time span tend to leave out life's most innocuous, but telling and truthful, moments in favor of great plot lurches and story highlights. It becomes like a Reader's Digest "condensed novel."

In the last ten years or so, the popularity of Gabriel García Márquez's work has increased exponentially. Oprah made him a sensation with her book club, but One Hundred Years of Solitude isn't his only buzzing tale. Love in the Time of Cholera has gotten its fair share of media attention as well -- most notably in two John Cusack movies. In Serendipity, he had to find the novel to get Kate Beckinsale's number, and in High Fidelity, Rob Gordon says that he understands the book (along with The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and says: "They're about girls. Right?" Just a week ago, Erik Davis shared the film adaptation's one sheet, and now The Hollywood Reporter has posted that it will get its world premiere during the Rio International Film Festival -- one of Latin America's biggest fests.

You still have a little bit of time to get in on the action, that is, if you have a schedule where spur-of-the-moment fest trips can be fit in. Rio runs from September 20-October 4, and the film is slated to close the fest. In case you're not familiar with the story -- it's a late 19th and early 20th century love triangle between Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Doctor Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), which spans 50 years in Colombia.* Sweetening the screening, director Mike Newell, Bardem, and some of the film's producers will be there on closing night. I can only hope this film does well and brings some of García Márquez's lesser-known works to light. I'd love to see what cinema could do with his non-fiction, first-person recreation -- The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. We'll find out soon enough -- the movie opens on November 16.

*Thanks to Lauren for the catch!

New Line was nice enough to provide Cinematical with the exclusive one-sheet for Love in the Time of Cholera (click on the poster for a larger version), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez's novel of the same name. Adapted for the screen by Oscar winner Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and directed by Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), Love in the Time of Cholera tells the tale of two lovers, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), one more obsessed than the other, who part ways at an early age to live two very different lives. The film then tracks each over the years (we're talking late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century), while Fermina settles down with a doctor (Benjamin Bratt) her father forces her to wed and Florentino engages in 622 affairs (not kidding about that) in an attempt to mask the pain he feels due to the one that got away. Also starring in this sure-to-be-an-Oscar-contender are Liev Schreiber, John Leguizamo, the very lovely (and talented) Catalina Sandino Moreno and Hector Elizondo. Love in the Time of Cholera (which also happens to be one of my favorite titles of all time for a number of reasons -- love is but a disease, after all) arrives in theaters on November 16.

It's taken several years, but it looks like Mike Newell's screen version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic, Love in the Time of Cholera, is finally coming together. Back in February, New Line had screenwriter Ronald Harwood hard at work on the script, and quickly signed Javier Bardem to star as "Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing." With that fantastic casting move under its belt, the studio went mostly quiet for a while (Benjamin Bratt and Giovanna Mezzogiorno were both brought on board during that time), presumably working on the boring parts of pre-production that the trades don't report.

Now, though, the casting department is back at work, and John Leguizamo (YAY!), Hector Elizondo and Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro have all signed the dotted line and agreed to take part in the film; production kicks off in a couple weeks in locations from England to Columbia Colombia, and the movie is due out some time next year.

Edit: ARG. The country name has been corrected, sorry. Some day we will get it right the first time.