The Motorcycle Diaries

Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna.
Directed by Walter Salles.
Written by Jose Rivera,based on books by Ernesto Che Guevara and Alberto Granado.
In Spanish with English subtitles

Programme Notes
(Printable PDF Version)

The following extracts of leading critics' reviews will describe some of the film's events, but should not detract from your enjoyment:

San Francisco Chronicle: (Read Original Article Here)

An ideology doesn't grab hold in one "eureka" moment. A heart and mind are shaped by family background, education and sometimes just as crucially, by one's first experiences outside the formative cocoon. The Motorcycle Diaries is a superb film about a physical and spiritual journey taken by the young Che Guevara, whose encounters with the unknown alter and affirm a life. Only tenuous connections are made between the tender young Guevara and the man who would later use and advocate violence. But it does present his youthful behaviour as a piece of an altruistic whole. The picture tracks only an 8,000-mile chunk of a very large life, but it makes serious inroads into humanizing an icon.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Read Original Article Here)

Thirty-seven years after his execution in the Bolivian jungle, Che Guevara lives on, immortalised on more T-shirts than ever. But the image is weirdly denuded of its associations: it is depoliticised and dehistoricised. Now Che is pure image, pure icon. Even Jimi Hendrix has more context.

Walter Salles's fervent, dreamily reverent biopic of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's legendary gap year won't do much to change this. Here is the epic tour of Latin America he took, as a short-haired 23-year-old medical student, with his friend Alberto Granado, a cheery postgrad in biochemistry, both guys seated astride Granado's spluttering Norton 500 motorbike. It is based partly on Che's own memoir - originally and unsexily called 'Travel Notes', later renamed The Motorcycle Diaries - and Granado's book 'Travels With Che Guevara'.

Their ambitious route took them from Guevara's elegant, upper-middle-class family home in Argentina, through the Andes, into Chile, then to the Peruvian Amazon and Machu Picchu, planning to arrive in Venezuela in time for Alberto's 30th birthday. And all this in 1952: no backpackers, no tourists, nothing but the open road, with some lovely landscapes exquisitely photographed by Eric Gautier. It has the same kind of sumptuously beautiful look Salles conjured for his Brazilian revenge drama Behind the Sun.

Here is Che's prerevolutionary existence, in its pristine state of idealism, passion and sheer vibrant youth. Just before he sets off, Che's father takes him aside and in a man-to-man moment of intimacy gives him something for emergencies. Not extra traveller's cheques or the Amex travel insurance hotline - but a handgun. Despite what Chekhov said about what happens when you see pistols in the first act, Che never uses this gun. In fact, we forget all about it. The question of violence is all in the future.

Guevara is played by the superbly handsome and charismatic Gael García Bernal, and he is utterly convincing as an energetic, fiercely idealistic, but formidably serious and focused young man. Rodrigo de la Serna plays the chubby and genial Granado, who provides light relief on the journey, and the heartstoppingly beautiful Mía Maestro is Che's patrician girlfriend and semi-official fiancée Chichina. On their journey, Granado and Guevara cheekily pass themselves off as doctors working on a cure for leprosy to obtain free board, lodging and motorcycle maintenance. Both have an eye for the ladies, which gets them chased out of town by furious husbands. But they also come into contact with a species they had never before properly encountered: poor people. They meet tenant farmers who have been high-handedly evicted and forced into itinerant labour - either fruit-picking or working in unspeakably grim and dangerous mines, in each case for foreign interests, often from the US.

Director Walter Salles has evidently found non-professionals to play many of the agrarian proletariat, and has been able to use them in locations that have not changed appreciably in 50 years. Like a sort of photojournalist, he reprises their cameo roles in sepia-hued, black-and-white portrait shots at the end, their rugged and weather-beaten faces beaming at us, as it were, outside the narrative. These are, runs the implication, the peoples of Latin America, a geopolitical unity that Che ringingly endorses in an impromptu speech at the leprosy hospital, where he and Granado have been working.

To some, these portraits will look like glorified tourist photos, or even a sentimentalisation of poverty. It is more likely that they are a sentimentalisation of Che himself, for whom this film contrives the slightly humdrum climax of swimming heroically between two islands of the leper colony. We see our young hero struggling with his asthma, which is treated with old-fashioned glass hypodermics of adrenaline. These are said to have given Che his ferocious rages: an unlovely side of his personality, and surely a part of his revolutionary temperament, but quite absent from this film.

Che was to become an admirer of Stalin - for a time at least - and a brilliant, ruthless military leader who had no objection to punishing transgressors by sending them into battle without a weapon; that is, to their certain death. He was also a great believer in summary justice and the firing squad. As governor of the national bank in Castro's Cuba - in which post, with considerable élan , he actually signed the banknotes "Che" - he was, arguably, the co-author of Cuba's ruinous dependence on the Soviet Union. But then came that martyrdom in the Bolivian jungle, cancelling the complicated side of Che's memory. He has not grown old as Fidel has grown old, and so the motorcycle diaries, the bold and thrilling testament of youth, are growing to be the most potent part of Che's myth. Salles does them justice.

Philip French, The Observer: (Read Original Article Here)

When he was murdered in Bolivia in October 1967 by the local army in association with the CIA, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara immediately took his place alongside Bolivar, Pancho Villa and other heroic Latin American revolutionaries. Comparable in popular appeal to Jack Kennedy, he immediately became for young people what TE Lawrence and Leon Trotsky had been for their parents, the contemporary model of the intellectual as man of action. Like Lawrence he was an irregular soldier who took up the cause of others. Like Trotsky he was a communist intellectual and second in command of a revolution that confounded political theory. Like both of them he was physically unprepossessing, but made up for this in charisma, and like them too, he died a violent death. All of them have been the subjects of movies, but only David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is a work of consequence, and the 1969 Hollywood picture Che! (co-scripted, like Lawrence, by Michael Wilson and starring an embarrassed Omar Sharif) is disastrous. Che also figured on stage narrating the grotesque Evita, but in Alan Parker's film version, while still called Che, he no longer wears the trademark beard and beret and is more like the Brechtian 'Man of the People' in A Man for All Seasons.

The tough, ruthless, ideologically driven Guevara, though still an icon of sorts through the ubiquity of the Alberto Korda photograph, is no longer the hero he once was. He's gone the way of Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book, to be replaced by the more benign figure of Nelson Mandela as the acceptable face of revolutionary politics. In fact, the Che that is offered us in Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is a diffident charmer, and the film is set in 1952, two years before he completed his medical studies, left his native Argentina for good, saw the CIA overthrow a democratic government in Guatemala, crossed into Mexico a confirmed revolutionary and met Fidel Castro.

In some ways the movie resembles Easy Rider, a picture made when Che's posthumous reputation was at its height, but it's altogether more cheerful, optimistic, benevolent, and Ernesto and Alberto are far more likeable and idealistic than the fashionable heroes of Dennis Hopper's movie. They're a complementary pair. The thin, asthmatic Ernesto is naive, withdrawn, compulsively honest and can't tell a tango from a mambo. The robust, moustached Alberto is a silver-tongued, outgoing womaniser, who can charm the birds off the trees and into bed. They are united by a belief in progress and what science and medicine can do for their region. The first stop is the grand hacienda in Miramar, south of Buenos Aires, where Guevara's fiancée lives in confident splendour. It's a beautifully observed episode of social privilege. Subsequently, with vividness and wit, the film presents the pair's own experience of being indigent and marginal. The film tends to idealise the poor and suggest they have a monopoly on kindness and decency.

The Motorcycle Diaries draw together several countries: the leading actors are Mexican and Argentine. Salles, whose best movie this is, is Brazilian. The excellent photography is the work of a Frenchman, Eric Gautier, and the producer is Robert Redford. Their film would, I think, still command our attention even if we didn't know what lies in store for its principal character, and it doesn't indulge in phoney hindsight.

There's a clever variation on the conventional final montage in black and white of people they met on the journey. Instead of an expected succession of still photographs there is a faint suggestion of movement in these carefully posed pictures to tell us that these everyday Latin American folk are not frozen in time but vibrantly alive.

Roger Ebert: (Read Original Article Here)

Che Guevara makes a convenient folk hero for those who have not looked very closely into his actual philosophy, which was repressive and authoritarian. Like his friend Fidel Castro, he was a right-winger disguised as a communist. He said he loved the people but he did not love their freedom of speech, their freedom to dissent, or their civil liberties. Cuba has turned out more or less as he would have wanted it to.

But all of that is far in the future as Ernesto and Alberto mount their battered old 1939 motorcycle and roar off for a trip around a continent they'll be seeing for the first time. The film, directed by Walter Salles (Central Station), follows them past transcendent scenery; we see forests, plains, high chaparral, deserts, lakes, rivers, mountains, spectacular vistas. And along the way the two travellers depend on the kindness of strangers; they're basically broke, and while Ernesto believes in being honest with people, Alberto gets better results by conning them.

Che's legend lives on, celebrated largely, I am afraid, by people on the left who have sentimentalized him without looking too closely at his beliefs and methods. He is an awfully nice man in the movie, especially as played by the sweet and engaging Gael Garcia Bernal (from Y Tu Mama Tambien). Pity how he turned out.

The movie is receiving devoutly favourable reviews. They are mostly a matter of Political Correctness, I think; it is uncool to be against Che Guevara. But seen simply as a film, The Motorcycle Diaries is attenuated and tedious. We understand that Ernesto and Alberto are friends, but that's about all we find out about them; they develop none of the complexities of other on-the-road couples, like Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde or Huck and Jim. There isn't much chemistry. For two radical intellectuals with exciting futures ahead of them, they have limited conversational ability, and everything they say is generated by the plot, the conventions of the situation, or standard pieties and impieties. Nothing is startling or poetic. (Note: To be fair, I must report that a Spanish-speaking friend tells me the spoken dialogue is much richer than the English subtitles indicate.)
Salles uses an interesting device to suggest how their experiences might have been burned into their consciousness so that lessons could be learned. He has poor workers, farmers, miners, peasants, beggars, who pose for the camera, not in still photos, but standing as still as they can, and he uses black and white for these tableaux, so that we understand they represent memory. It's an effective technique, and we are meant to draw the conclusion that the adult Che would help these people, although it is a good possibility he did more harm to them.

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