March 2nd, 2005
The Motorcycle Diaries
Walter Salles goes behind the face that launched a thousand t-shirts and examines a deep friendship and how one crazy summer on the road can change your life forever.
It’s hard to forget that it is 37 years since the death of Ernesto Che Guevara when Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait still dominates T-shirts the world over. Even harder to comprehend is that fact that it’s taken until now to make a film about his life. Some will correct this and include the confused 1969 film ‘Che!’ (not sure what the exclamation is for) but with Omar Shariff uneasily in the title role, it’s an awkward portrayal. In South American terms, he’s an obvious choice for a biopic, especially as the nearest we have to a film about a Latin political icon is Alan Parker’s misguided Evita. Walter Salles has even beaten Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ project to it with ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, a Film Four funded and Robert Redford produced account of El Che. But this Che is not the beret-clad idealist, it is the young man he was before he became Cuba’s paladin. What gives ‘The Motorcycle Diaries more veracity is the fact that the film is based on Guevara’s own writings and ‘Travelling With Che Guevara’, an account written by his friend Alberto Granada. Ernesto Guevara was a 23-year-old medical student, Granada a slightly older biochemist pal when the two set off on an unreliable 1939 Norton 500 to explore their home continent.
The film is also a road movie, and with all road movies it parallels an internal journey of self-discovery. Both men came from wealthy backgrounds that didn’t prepare them for the kind of lives they encounter in the valleys and villages of South America. Faced with deprivation and social injustice, the path Ernesto Guevara must take is subtly traced. Each encounter builds to a realisation more obvious to the viewer (with the benefit of hindsight obviously) than the inchoate pre-revolutionary Che. Salles doesn’t labour the point and these scenes are built up gradually, schismed with humour in the interactions between the two very different men. Ernesto is frank, asthmatic and a little dispassionate. Alberto is a womanising, loveable rogue who begins to see the political awakening in his young friend. The trip is an apostasy for Che; it confirms his belief that he is meant to help others, and not in the way he originally thought. He is about to finish his medical degree but his self-doubt about his purpose in life reaches an apex when they visit San Pablo, the largest leper colony in South America. Set on the banks of the Andes, the patients and staff are housed on separate islands, metaphorically and geographically segregated. Che and Alberto refuse to wear gloves and are tactile with the patients. His affection for these, and all the people he meets, is summed up in a poignant and overly metaphorical seen. On his last night at the colony - and his birthday - Che swims the crocodile-infested river in the dark to say his goodbyes.
Visually, the film captivates. From inhospitable coalmines to the unequalled awe of Machu Picchu, every scene is distilled with beauty. The film was shot in more than 30 locations in Argentina, Chile and Peru and the rural settings bring to mind the agrarian landscape of his earlier film ‘Behind The Sun’. Salles revels in the landscapes of his native continent - from the urban decay of ‘City of God’ to the desolate mountain backdrop seen in Central Station. If his locations deal with boundaries, his characters inhabit the periphery. Salles, like Guevara, comes from an affluent background and he had a similar epiphany about the idea of class. He began making films to address the issues of South America’s marginalised classes. Consistently, he takes the less obvious route but here the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal is predictable and, I feel, doesn’t quite work. Bernal is a credible and talented actor but does not carry the weight of this role at all. Perhaps because he is the ubiquitous rising star of Latin American film-making, or that he’s just too good-looking - either way the diminutive Mexican’s performance is overshadowed by the brilliance of co-star Rodrigo De La Serna.
What’s so likeable about this film is that it’s the story of a young man, not the face that launched a thousand T-shirts. Part-bildungsroman, part-roadtrip, it’s a wonderful examination of a deep friendship and how one crazy summer on the road can change your life forever. ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ depicts Che Guevara as more than just the ne plus ultra revolutionary, it makes him a real person.