The Motorcycle Diaries


by Shari L. Rosenblum

The most photogenic revolutionary of the photographic era, Che Guevara might well be remembered best as the communist whose image made a capitalist's dream. His iconic beret, star and stare, as captured but not copyrighted by Alberto Korda over 40 years ago, has been posted to many a dorm room wall and trendy book bag by pressed-khaki rebels at the Ivy Leagues. (Only Smirnoff's had to pay back in the end for the mass-distributed snapshot; apparently the association with alcohol threatened to tarnish Che's reputation).

Capitalism cashes in again in The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles' (Central Station) astonishingly romantic adaptation of Che's before-"Che" after-the-fact accounts of his early adventures across the Latin American continent (Notas de Viaje) and his traveling companion's sidestory (Traveling with Che Guevara). Starring the soft-faced Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Amores Perros), whom the camera loves at least as well as Korda's did Che's, Salles' film is part hagiography, part impassioned plea to the undergraduate socialist within us all. The voice of conscience is placed first in the mouth of Che's traveling companion, the Falstaff-like biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), and then fully embodied by the soulful, asthmatic, awakening young Che himself, still the idealistic medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. You almost expect to hear trumpets blaring, but there's a softness to the music lilting through the film (even at its most energetic) that cushions the audience from any anticipated blows of the hammer.

Tracking Che and Alberto from Argentina through Peru in 1952, first on an ironically named motorcycle, The Mighty One, soon fallen, and then on foot, the screenplay by Jose Rivera is filled with jovial comraderie and good ol' boy humor, playfulness and charm. Heart pounding with earnestness, it gives us ideas that are poetic before they are political. Observations turn to frustrations turn to anger and then to nascent action (the viewer is expected to bring the history into the screening, to know full well, and appreciate what comes next) -- and while the fever rises, there is a running joke that attributes the travelers' lyrical notations to either Lorca or Neruda. Even the Latin American landscape against which the tale is told is framed in dulcet tones. Shot by cinematographer Eric Gautier as a moving canvas of beauty tarnished only by injustice, it flashes harmonious greens and golds, barren deserts and snowy woods. It is breathtaking and beyond words, though the non-still grained images at the film's end seem clichéd and unworthy of the rest --reminiscent of Dogville's overly insistent final images.

Those on the ideological left may find The Motorcycle Diaries too understated -- there is only off-handed acknowledgment of the power of guns, or the philosophy of communism -- but the film is clearly apologist. if not downright worshipful of its hero. Quietly elegiac on its surface and inspiring in its counterpoints, it makes clear its lineage of distrust of the advantaged, the unfairness of ownership and the dehumanization of the disenfranchised. It expects the audience to come in revering Che, and to come out understanding better why. It is not a subtle undertaking. Salles has a penchant for obvious symbolism, particularly of the Christian variety, and he makes no bones about Che as a Christ-figure in the making -- snaking the biblical references through the cinematic text -- Che's ultimate (historical?) embrace of the lepers being the act of his conversion from boy to man, man to god, doctor to revolutionary.

There is no attempt in The Motorcycle Diaries to reconcile the revolutionary's hateful murderousness with the peaceful loving of the doctor on the cusp (in fact a reference to the CIA in the end suggests it sees no conflict there), but those who know the history have already taken sides, and those who don't will find no reason in this film to ever do so. What both may come away with, though, is an idea of idealism (still) unsullied, burgeoning, but (yet) unbloodied, a variation on the sentiment the screenplay gives to Che in Machu Picchu: the nostalgia for something we have never known.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene