The Problem of Voice in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service

Francisco Lombardi's film adaptation of Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service fails to realize, or interestingly re imagine, the crucial aesthetic/formal treatment of voice in the novel. The novel is heteroglossic and, through its inclusion of multiple styles (military reports, telescopic dialogue, epistolary, and more) it achieves what Robert Stam would refer to as "multi-trackness". Stam uses this term in his essay to differentiate between novels and film--the novel has one plain whereas film can place its different tracks (sound,visual,etc.) in dialogue with each other. However, within Llosa's novel, different perspectives disjoint and coalesce the narrative giving it a richness of voices and views. Lombardi's film does not do this. This scenario is a reversal of Stam's theoretical frame. In this case the novel not the film makes use of multi-trackness. The only attempt at mimicking the novel's use of voice is a voice-over track wherein Pantoja reads military reports he has written. As Michael Chanan points out in his introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment a voice-over narration as a replacement of first person narration is hardly interchangeable. It fails to achieve the closeness to the character and source. In essence the adaptation fails because, beyond this voice-over, it makes no attempt to capture or adapt the skill and intrigue of the experimentation with multiple voices.