Here is my review
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (Diarios de motocicleta)
Directed by Walter Salles (2004)
"Always be capable of feeling deep inside any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world." - Ché Guevara
The Motorcycle Diaries is about the early years of Marxist revolutionary hero Ernesto Ché Guevara and the process that led him to give up a promising medical career to become a radical activist. Directed by Brazilian Walter Salles and adapted from the journals of Guevara and his traveling companion Alberto Granado, the film shows how their 8,000 mile road trip across South America in 1952 on a 1939 Norton motorcycle led to Guevara's powerful transformation. The narration, based on Guevara's observations in his diaries and his letters home during the time that he was away, gives the film a poetic tone that contrasts sharply with the earthy screenplay of Jose Rivera. Rodrigo de la Serna, an Argentine actor, plays the lusty biochemist Alberto who is there for Ché when he is suffering asthma attacks and his aid in their constant struggle to find food and shelter. Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien) portrays Guevara as an appealing middle class youth coming face to face with injustice, perhaps for the first time in his life.
The trip takes the two friends from Buenos Aires, west to Patagonia, Chile, through the snow-covered Andes, then north to Cuzco, Machu Picchu and Lima. The journey is beautifully photographed by Eric Gautier and the gorgeous vistas of South America themselves are worth the price of admission. In the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile, Guevara meets a family looking for work at the Chuquicamata copper mine, the world's largest open-pit mine, run by American mining conglomerates and a symbol of U.S. economic domination. Their chances of finding work are slim since they are Communists, yet they have no alternative but to keep going in order to survive. Guevara writes in his diary: "By the light of the single candle … the contracted features of the worker gave off a mysterious and tragic air … the couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world." Feeling their plight, he offers them the fifteen U.S. dollars given to him by his wealthy girlfriend when he left Miramar, Argentina.
The travelers volunteer for three weeks at San Pablo, a leper colony deep in the Amazon where nuns enforce a strict separation between patients and staff and refuse to feed anyone that does not attend mass. Guevara rebels against the rules and refuses to attend mass or wear rubber gloves when greeting patients. To show his solidarity with the lepers he swims across a two and one-half stretch of the Amazon to be with the patients on his 24th birthday. On this occasion, he gives his first political speech. "We believe, he said, "and after this trip even more firmly than before, that Latin America's division into illusory and uncertain nationalities is completely fictitious". When Alberto goes to work in Venezuela, Ché returns to Buenos Aires proclaiming himself a changed man. "I will be on the side of the people … I will take to the barricades and the trenches, screaming as one possessed, will stain my weapons with blood, and, mad with rage, will cut the throat of any vanquished foe I encounter," he writes in his diary.
Though its political implications are not hidden, The Motorcycle Diaries stays away from sermonizing except to ask -- what is the Latin American identity beyond the strong colonial influence, the different languages, and the varying political systems? Salles does not offer any answers and touches on issues of class-consciousness and injustice from a safe distance. Although the film endorses idealism in a world grown cynical, it offers its radicalism as an entertaining road trip, a cinematic T-shirt for comfortable middle class audiences that ignores such untidy adjuncts of social upheaval as internment camps, prisoners shot on sight, and bloodlust against real or perceived enemies. Nothing is said about conditions in present day Latin America where the richest 10 percent account for 35 percent of total earnings, where 43 percent of the population live below the poverty line, and where 20 million people are poorer today than they were in 1997.
Guevara was a revolutionary who fought for social justice and his legend is an inspiration to thousands who languish under oppressive regimes, yet beyond the myth is a complex and driven man capable of ruthlessness and hard line adherence to an ideology that trampled on human rights. The Motorcycle Diaries succeeds in preserving the symbol but overlooks the man, simplistically presenting only the sentimental side of a multi-faceted personality. If we want insight into who Ché Guevara was, what drove him, and what demons caused him to proclaim, "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become", we will have to look elsewhere.
GRADE: B+
"They must find it hard, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority" Gerald Massey
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