[Mb-hair] Motorcycle Diaries re: Che

[Michael Butler]

Barbara,
Thanks I am sure going to see this film.
XO Michael

-- "The past is never dead", William Faulkner said, "It isn't ever past"



> 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
> 
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