[Mb-hair] Motorcycle Diaries re: Che

[Barbara Siomos]

The New York Times 
September 24, 2004
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES' 
On the Road With Young Che
By A. O. SCOTT 

In the spring of 1952, two young men set out by motorcycle on an
ambitious, footloose journey that they hoped would carry them from
Buenos Aires up the spine of Chile, across the Andes and into the
Peruvian Amazon. (They made it, a little behind schedule, though the
unfortunate motorcycle did not.) Their road trip, however inspired and
audacious it might have been, could have faded into personal memory and
family lore, even though both travelers produced written accounts of
their adventures.
 
The older, a 29-year-old biochemist named Alberto Granado, is still
alive and appears at the very end 
of "The Motorcycle Diaries," Walter Salles's stirring and warm-hearted
reconstruction of that long-ago voyage. Granado's companion was a
23-year-old medical student named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, whose
subsequent career as a political idol, revolutionary martyr and T-shirt
icon — Che! — reflects a charismatic, mysterious glow onto his early
life.
 
"Is it possible to be nostalgic for a world you never knew?" Ernesto
wonders as he contemplates Inca ruins in the Peruvian highlands. Mr.
Salles's film, as ardent and serious a quest as Ernesto's turned out to
be, poses a similar question. In making their movie, the cast and crew
retraced the route of 
Granado and Guevara three times, trying to connect not only with the
varied, rugged landscape of South 
America but also with the hopes and confusions of an earlier time: an
era before the Cuban revolution, 
before the military coups and dirty wars of the 1960's and 70's, before
the democratic resurgence 
and economic catastrophes that followed.
 
The filmmakers are not so naïve as to suppose that
the old days were simpler or more innocent than the
present. The movie's feeling of freshness and possibility comes from the
wide-eyed intelligence of 
its heroes. But one reason to explore the past is to try to rediscover
an elusive sense of forgotten possibility, and in Mr. Salles's hands
what might 
have been a schematic story of political awakening becomes a lyrical
exploration of the sensations and perceptions from which a political
understanding of the world emerges. 

What "The Motorcycle Diaries" captures, with startling clarity and
delicacy, is the quickening of Ernesto's youthful idealism, and the
gradual turning of his passionate, literary nature toward an as yet
unspecified form of radical commitment.
 
In declining to follow the subsequent course of that passion — into
the Sierra Maestre, the Congo and 
the mountains of Bolivia, where Guevara met his bloody end — Mr.
Salles risks being accused of idealizing his subject. It's a fair
charge, but one that misses the director's fidelity to his literary
sources. Guevara's diaries, discovered in a knapsack long 
after his death, were published in 1993, and much of their appeal lies
in the sense of immediacy they convey. Their author did not know who he
would become, even as the notebooks themselves dramatize a crucial stage
in his development.
 
At the beginning, at home with his bourgeois Buenos Aires family,
Ernesto (Gael García Bernal) 
is not Che, but "Fuser" — sensitive, asthmatic and perhaps a bit of a
dilettante. Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna), lecherous, plump and
gregarious, full of good-natured, blustery trash talk, is Falstaff to
Fuser's Prince Hal. While there is a worthy goal at the end of their
journey — they intend to work in a leper colony in Peru — the main
purpose is tourism, both high minded and low. They want to see as much
of Latin America as they can — more than 8,000 kilometers (about 5,000
miles) in just a few months — and also bed as many Latin American
beauties as will fall for their ridiculous pick-up lines.

Alberto may be the self-declared ladies' man, but Mr. Bernal, with his
smoldering eyes and equine features, is the movie's heartthrob. Though
the film does, by the end, view Ernesto as a quasi-holy figure, turning
away from the corruptions of the world toward a higher purpose, he is
also portrayed as a mischievous, eager boy. Early in the film, the
travelers stop in the seaside town of Miramar to visit Ernesto's
girlfriend, Chichina (Mía Maestro), whose wealthy parents clearly
disapprove of him, to say nothing of the uncouth Alberto (who promptly
seduces the family's maid). The scenes between Ernesto and Chichina have
the delicious ache of late-adolescent longing, a feeling that suffuses
the film even as it turns its attention to graver matters. 

At times, "The Motorcycle Diaries," which opens today in New York and
Los Angeles, bounces along
like a conventional buddy picture, animated by Ernesto and Alberto's
mechanical mishaps and good-natured squabbles. But the film, written by 
José Rivera, is really a love story in the form of a travelogue. The
love it chronicles is no less profound — and no less stirring to the
senses — for 
taking place not between two people but between a person and a
continent. Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding,
the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the
cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring
and enigmatic beauty.
 
At the end of the film, after his sojourn at the leper colony has
confirmed his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, Ernesto
makes a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it
he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends the arbitrary
boundaries of nation and 
race.
 
"The Motorcycle Diaries," combining the talents of a Brazilian director
and leading actors from Mexico (Mr. Bernal) and Argentina (Mr. de la
Serna), pays heartfelt tribute to this idea. In an age of mass tourism,
it also unabashedly revives the venerable, romantic notion that travel
can enlarge the soul, and even change the world.
 
  "The Motorcycle Diaries" is rated R (Under 17 requires
accompanying parent or adult guardian) for strong language and sexual
references.
 
  THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
 
Directed by Walter Salles; written (in Spanish, with English subtitles)
by José Rivera, based on "The Motorcycle Diaries" by Ernesto Che
Guevara and "With Che Through Latin America" by Alberto Granado;
director of photography, Eric Gautier; 
edited by Daniel Rezende; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production
designer, Carlos Conti; produced by Michael Nozik, Edgard Tenembaum 
and Karen Tenkhoff; released by Focus Features. Running time: 126
minutes. This film is rated R. 
WITH: Gael García Bernal (Ernesto Guevara de la 
Serna), Rodrigo de la Serna (Alberto Granado) and Mía Maestro
(Chichina Ferreyra).
 
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company