On the Road to
Greatness Based on Che Guevara's early
days, The Motorcycle Diaries is a tender tribute to the young
man, not the myth By JUMANA
FAROUKY
PAULA PRANDINI/IMAGE.NET
BIKER BOY: As Guevara, Bernal tones down
the sex appeal and turns up the charm
Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004 As icons of the 1960s go,
few are more ubiquitous and less understood than Che Guevara. His
name has become a catch-all phrase for rebellion, and his image is
on posters, mugs and boxer shorts, but only as the instantly
recognizable two-tone portrait taken by Alberto Korda in 1960. In
his evolution from Castro's right-hand man to the face that launched
a thousand T shirts, Guevara has been frozen in time, always and
forever the revolutionary. But most people have little sense of how
he got there, or that, once upon a time, he was just a guy whose
biggest problem was trying to get his girlfriend to sleep with him.
Enter Walter Salles. In his latest film, The Motorcycle
Diaries, the Oscar-nominated Brazilian director (Central
Station) looks at Guevara before he started making history (imagine
Mel Gibson making a film about a carpenter who wonders why he
doesn't look like his dad). Salles' yet-to-be hero is the
23-year-old Ernesto Guevara, a romantic, asthmatic Argentinian
medical student who hasn't yet picked up a gun or earned the
nickname Che (a casual Argentinian slang word, like "O.K." or
"buddy"). Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, the film is
based on the journals that Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado
kept on their eight-month journey across Latin America in 1952, from
Buenos Aires through Argentina, Chile, Peru and Venezuela. The
motorcycle of the title, a beat-up 1939 Norton 500 optimistically
named the Mighty One, only makes it as far as Los Angeles,
Chile, but stubbornness and curiosity keep the adventurers moving
toward their destination: a leper colony in San Pablo where they
have volunteered to work. On the way, they discover a uniting Latin
American identity and witness the poverty, illness and social
injustice a world away from their comfortable, middle-class lives.
By the time they reach San Pablo, Guevara's consciousness has been
raised, the seeds of revolution planted.
"It's a film about
the necessity to react to what seems unfair and unjust," says
Salles, "about making choices that will have an impact not only on
your life, but also the lives of other people." It was producer
Michael Nozik, working with Robert Redford, who approached Salles
with the idea of realizing Guevara's writings. "I had seen
Central Station and knew I wanted to work with him," Nozik
says. "Walter is the kind of director who's open to everything
around him. He just goes with the flow and I think that adds to the
vitality of the movie."
To get hold of the rights, they went
to Gianni Minà, an Italian journalist and documentarian who had
received permission from Guevara's widow, Aleida March, to publish
her late husband's manuscripts and turn them into a film. "I worked
on it for seven years," Minà says. "But eventually I realized it
would be impossible for me to make this movie. It would be too
difficult to travel across Latin America with a crew of 50 people.
It's difficult now with jeeps and helicopters, I don't
It's about making choices
that will have an impact not only on your life, but also
the lives of other people.
— WALTER SALLES,
director
know how those two did it 50
years ago." Just as he had finally given up, he got a call from a
man of greater means. "It was Robert Redford, and he said he thought
it was such a romantic story, he wanted to make the film." Minà
became the artistic supervisor, helping with three years of research
(which meant visiting all the countries on the route twice and
talking to Guevara's relatives and the real Granado, now 82) and
developing the screenplay, which was first written in English and
then translated into the colloquial Spanish of the 1950s. The money
from the deal went into the Che Guevara Center of Studies in Havana,
from where March oversees all things Che.
Mexican golden boy
Gael García Bernal was Salles' first and only choice to play
Guevara. "Could it be anybody else?" he asks. "Gael is the most
visceral, talented and mature actor of his generation." Others have
played the revolutionary onscreen: Omar Sharif in a much-reviled
1969 biopic; Antonio Banderas alongside Madonna's Eva Perón in
Evita; and, soon, Benicio Del Toro in Steven Soderbergh's
upcoming Che. They all look the part and get to gaze
intensely, speak rousingly, and wave a gun — all film-friendly
signals of impassioned freedom fighting. But the pre-revolutionary
Motorcycle Diaries calls for naïveté, not intensity, and
slowly dawning certainty instead of fervent resolution. Bernal isn't
the hunky, smoldering Che; he's the thoughtful, awkward Ernesto —
and he's splendid, though he doesn't radiate a potent sensuality the
way he did as a scheming transvestite in Pedro Almodóvar's Bad
Education. Instead, his Guevara is all goofy charm and dissolving
innocence (more like his character in 2001's Y Tu Mamá
También, but without the sex). His weapon is his wide, crooked
smile. It's disarming and endearing, and as Guevara's carefree
escapade turns into something far more significant, it proves an
excellent tension-breaker.
As his spirited friend and travel
companion Granado, Rodrigo de la Serna (who's related to the real
Guevara) provides the perfect foil to his shy, noble cohort. Guevara
may be the heart of the film, but Granado — warm, witty and full of
life — is its soul. De la Serna tackles the role of skirt-chasing,
wise-cracking Granado with mischievous glee. And why shouldn't he?
This is, after all, his story, too.
In the great tradition
of buddy movies, Guevara and Granado spend as much time arguing as
they do hugging, and it's a joy to watch. No doubt it's their
kinetic relationship — a little Easy Rider, a touch
Butch and Sundance — as much as the stunning scenery (Machu
Picchu, the Andes, the Amazon) and the sociopolitical undercurrent
that made The Motorcycle Diaries a hit at Sundance and
Cannes and has insiders whispering about an Oscar nomination. The
film has already made almost $5 million in Brazil, Italy and
Argentina (not bad for a film that cost less than $10 million to
make), and as it opens in Britain this week it looks to be one of
those rare cinematic creatures: a non-English-language film with
real crossover appeal. "This part of Guevara's life is the most
universally accessible," says Nozik. "Especially for young people,
it taps into the questions of what you do when you're in school, or
when you leave college, what do you do with your life? There is a
sense of adventure there."
It helps that the film never
resorts to tub thumping. Salles doesn't explicitly lay blame for the
social conditions they come across; instead he fills the screen with
the real people that his actors, retracing Guevara's and Granado's
steps, met and spoke with: dispossessed farmers, poor miners,
homeless families and lepers. The stark black-and-white portraits
show a population strong with pride. For just a moment, they become
the icons.
By peering behind the myth, Salles has made a man
out of Che Guevara. The only glimpse of where the man is headed
comes when Granado thinks aloud about the options for peaceful
revolution. "A revolution without guns?" Guevara says. "It'll never
work." That he would go on to help lead the Cuban revolution, be
killed in Bolivia and become one of the most influential communist
figures of all time is left for a blurb at the end. The
Motorcycle Diaries isn't about greatness — it's about the
potential for greatness. And this magical film is a far higher
tribute than any T shirt.
From the Aug. 25,
2004 issue of TIME Europe magazine
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