The Motorcycle Diaries
Written by Jose Rivera, based on the books of Che Guevera and Alberto Granado
Directed by Walter Salles
With Gael Garcˇa Bernal & Rodrigo De la Serna.
REVIEW BY DUROYAN FERTL
On January 4, 1952, 23-year-old Argentine Ernesto Guevara De la Serna and his 29-year-old friend Alberto Granado set out from Buenos Aires to traverse Latin America on a dilapidated Norton 500cc motorbike, optimistically named “La Poderosa” (The Powerful One). Their journey is the subject of Brazilian Walter Salles’ new film.
Guevara, played here by Gael Garcia Bernal, is in his final year of medical school, while Granado (played by Guevara’s second cousin Rodrigo De la Serna) is a biochemist. Guevara kept an account of their adventure in his diaries, which were first published in 1993 under the same name and were used as the backbone for the film.
Guevera and Granado had originally planned to reach Venezuela for Granado’s 30th birthday, after navigating the length of the continent. As Guevara put it: “8000 kilometres covered in four months; method: improvisation; equipment: a 1939 Norton 500; goal: to explore a continent we had only known in books”. They missed their deadline, but found more important goals to pursue.
Along the way, Guevara was inspired to dedicate his life to ending the suffering and injustice he witnessed. Within just a few years he would become world-famous as “Che”, a central leader of the Cuban socialist revolution that overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Che’s image became a worldwide symbol of resistance to imperialist aggression.
The movie begins in a romantic tone, with Guevara's emotional farewells to his family and girlfriend, offset by the levity of Granado's slapstick behaviour, before the pair set out to try to fast-talk their way around the continent.
Leaving middle-class Argentina behind, they ride into the wilds of Patagonia and on to Chile, where the motorbike expires on collision with a cow, forcing them to continue by other means. This region of South America is spectacularly beautiful, and the film doesn’t disappoint. Cinematographer Eric Gautier fills our senses with awe-inspiring images of the Andes and the pristine lake region of Chile.
The mood darkens, however, as the travellers encounter the poverty and exploitation that afflicts most of Latin America. The impoverished miners of Chile, peasants evicted from their land, the slums of Lima and the ever-present reminder of a neglected indigenous population catch Guevara’s attention, often in contrast to his companion’s self-indulgent behaviour. By the time the pair finally reach San Pablo, a leper colony in Amazonian Peru, their adventuring spirit has been replaced by an urgent need to address the suffering and injustice all around them.
The film gives the necessary treatment to Che’s time at the leper colony to make it clear how important it was to him. Opposing the terrorising treatment of the lepers by the nuns, his rebellion culminates in a dramatic gesture of kinship with the lepers, within which we can see the man who was prepared to die in the fight to unite Latin America in struggle against injustice.
The Guevara we first meet in the film is a young man, idealistic, somewhat naive, and full of his own contradictions. During the film, we see him conclude from the injustice he experiences first hand that far-reaching change is necessary. Salles exposes us to the same injustices that radicalised Guevara, showing how they raised his awareness of the exploitation meted out by industry, government and church alike, but he offers no real political analysis of why.
This might seem odd, in a movie about the man would become one of the world’s best known communists. But The Motorcycle Diaries was not made to be a political film, nor a film about a “pre-packaged” revolutionary. Not even the final scenes provide us with a clear “break”, where the revolutionary Guevara suddenly appears. Overt political references are rare, and usually only in the background — a book or an overheard comment. But they complement the well-documented injustices, and create a sense of inevitability about Guevara’s future political growth.
In the words of Salles: “I wanted the film to be the story of this transformation, but not in a dogmatic or didactic way. ... Like if we walked for two hours under a light rain, at the end we were soaking wet, but we had hardly noticed.”
This idea is an echo of Guevara himself, who, at the end of his journey, looks back at “myself, the man I used to be”. Still, beneath the cover of what is, in many ways, a “coming of age” story, a profound transformation is taking place.
We see Guevera and Granado visit the enormous Chuquicamata copper mine, the world's largest open-pit mine at that time, run by US mining monopolies and a main source of Chile’s wealth. A meeting with a homeless communist couple seeking work had a profound impact on Guevara, who wrote: “The couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world.”
His anger at the degrading treatment of the workers spills over, and he throws rocks at a company truck. By the time they reach the Incan ruin of Macchu Picchu, Guevara and his companion are discussing the possibility of radical social change, of creating a mass workers’ party, which Guevara dismisses as doomed unless it is armed to defend itself.
This idea was to reverberate not only through Che Guevara’s life, but also throughout the history of revolutionary struggle in Latin America. After flying home via Venezuela (where the film finishes), Guevara returned to the road in 1953, where he experienced US aggression first hand.
In 1954, Guatemala’s popular leftist President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup, providing Guevara with support for his theory. Not long after, by then a committed Marxist, he would join Fidel Castro’s guerrilla war in Cuba to overthrow the US-backed dictator Batista. Finally, in 1967, while trying to lead another guerrilla war in Bolivia, he would die at the hands of a battalion of CIA-backed Bolivian rangers.
Walter Salles has faithfully presented the tale of Che Guevara’s journey, crafted into a highly moving drama. Made with the assistance of Alberto Granado (who makes a cameo appearance), and Che’s family, The Motorcycle Diaries is neither a simple celebration of Guevara’s life and exploits, nor a crass merchandising stunt to cash in on the popularity of Che’s image. In fact, it is not so much a movie about Che and who he was, but about what drove him to revolutionary action, and, should urge us to do likewise.
What first set Guevara changing the world was not a theory, or sheer emotion, but his experience of the reality of everyday existence for the majority of the world’s population. At the end of the film, we are shown Che’s photos from the journey. Throughout the film, Salles shows us disturbingly similar images of present-day Latin America — illiterate Quechua Indians, the slums of Lima.
The same injustice and poverty that Che dedicated his life to destroying 50 years ago is still with us, in Latin America and around the world. Despite aid and humanitarian missions, poverty and inequality is increasing. To Che, who later gave up practising medicine to fight for revolutionary change, ‘band-aid’ solutions of aid, or medicine, or development incentives, were never going to change this. He believed it was necessary to destroy the system of exploitation — capitalism and its profiteering — and replace it with a humane system that shares the wealth of the world amongst its citizens.
This film could inspire many more to learn more about Che, his ideas, and the struggle that he made his life. It is the highest grossing non-English language movie in US history, and Che’s book was ninth on the bestsellers list at the time of the US election.
Che’s legacy can be seen most clearly in Cuba, and places like Venezuela, where social revolutions, resisting massive attack from the US and its allies, are building a better, fairer society.
Che’s example sets us the challenge of fighting to make such a global society a reality, for ourselves and for the oppressed everywhere, by joining the struggles against injustice. We can all find inspiration in something Che Guevara once said: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”
[Duroyan Fertl is a member of the socialist youth organisation Resistance. To get involved, visit <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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