Jonathan Richards
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
Directed by Walter Salles
Rated R, 126 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles
HIT THE ROAD, CHE
The child, as William Wordsworth observed, is
father of the man, and buried inside each public
figure is the young man or woman who formed the mature
personality. The Motorcycle Diaries offers us a
romantic look at a few formative months in the life of
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the man who would become a
world-famous icon of posters, tee shirts, and
revolution.
In January of 1952 the 24-year-old Guevara (Gael
García Bernal of Y Tu Mama Tambien) had finished his
second year of medical school when he and his best
friend, a biochemist named Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de
la Serna, a second cousin of Guevara), decided to take
a road trip. Riding double on "The Mighty One (La
Poderosa)", a beat-up 1939 Norton 500 ("You can fix
anything with wire!"), they set out from Buenos Aires
to see the continent, heading south to Tierra del
Fuego, up the length of Chile, through Peru and into
Venezuela – a journey of more than 8,000 kilometers.
The bike (despite the title) did not make it; the
young men did.
The movie combines standard road trip/buddy movie
conventions with the internalized journey of an
awakening consciousness of injustice in the world.
It's Easy Rider meets The Grapes of Wrath. The guys
set out guided by the beacons of adventure and sex.
They hope to sleep with girls, preferably sisters, in
every village and town of South America. But an
early stop is at the hacienda where Ernesto's
girlfriend (Mía Maestro) lives with her patrician
parents, who cast a cold eye on the young medical
student. She promises to wait for him if it's not too
long, a tepid commitment that predictably lasts only
through a few tanks of gas before the "Dear Ernesto"
letter reaches him. To give the lady her due, maybe
she sensed something; by the end of the trip there is
no chance he would ever have passed her way again.
The early part of the movie is mostly thrills,
chills, and plenty of spills as the buddies bicker and
bond. In southern Chile, as they romance a pair of
sisters, we learn the origin of the nickname "Che" –
according to the girls, it's the way the Argentines
speak. As they roll on north, there's some slapstick
comedy, including a weak, out-of-character scene where
Che bullies a woman and they get chased by an angry
mob.
Che complicates their journey with a stubborn
insistence on telling the truth, where Alberto's
prescription of a little sugar-coating might score
them more food and female companionship. By the time
they pass into Peru, the seeds of radicalism have been
planted. By the flickering light of a campfire they
hear the first of a series of tales of the oppression
of the poor by the rich. The farther north they go
the more injustice they see – a young farming couple
forced off their land, starving workers mistreated by
harsh foremen. Che grows increasingly thoughtful and
introspective, despite Alberto's robust efforts to
keep his mind on girls. As they look down on the
wonders of Machu Picchu, the future revolutionary
wonders how "a civilization that created this could be
destroyed to produce something like Lima."
One of the destinations of the two young medics
is a leper colony in Peru where they volunteer, and
there Che's social conscience deepens in the face of
the suffering of the sick. The colony straddles a
river; the lepers live on one of its banks, the
healthy staff on the other. On the night of a party
thrown at the clinic for his twenty-fourth birthday,
the asthmatic Che plunges into the river, ignoring the
pleas of Alberto, and swims across to the side where
the poor and afflicted are. His personal Rubicon has
been crossed, you understand, and there will be no
turning back.
Both principal actors are excellent, but it is
the soft-eyed, soulful Bernal who gives this story its
heartbeat. His enormous charm keeps us involved even
through stretches of thin episodic narrative. He
combines the sensitivity and the strength that are the
foundations of the revolutionary he will become. What
we do not see foreshadowed is the killer. The only
hint of violence Che exhibits here is when he throws a
stone at a truck driven by exploiting bosses. We do
not see the rigid ideologue. It's a gentle, saintly
character that Bernal and director Salles give us;
this is a man who might have gone on to become Mahatma
Ghandi.
It's an engrossing journey for the most part, and
many of the images of South America provided by
cinematographer Eric Gautier are breathtaking. This
account is based on the actual diaries Che kept on the
journey, which were discovered in a knapsack years
after his death. They were published in 1993 as
Diarios de Motocicleta: Notas de Viaje. The other
source material is Granado's memoir, Con el Che por
America Latina. Granado, still living in Cuba in his
eighties, appears in a screen-filling closeup at the
end of the film.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38798 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1327020 X-RT-TitleID: 1136253 X-RT-SourceID: 896 X-RT-AuthorID: 2779
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