The Motorcycle Diaries / Diarios de motocicleta

Plots summary
The Motorcycle Diaries is an adaptation of a journal written by Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna when he was 23 years old. He and his friend, Alberto Granado are typical college students who, seeking fun and adventure before graduation, decide to travel across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela in order to do their medical residency at a leper colony. Beginning as a buddy/road movie in which Ernesto and Alberto are looking for chicks, fun and adventure before they must grow up and have a more serious life. As is said in the film itself, it's about "two lives running parallel for a while." The two best friends start off with the same goals and aspirations, but by the time the film is over, it's clear what each man's destiny has become.
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A soulful film takes Che Guevara's radicalization slow.
by Kenneth Turan
"The Motorcycle Diaries" is not what you might be expecting. Though it links future charismatic revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, criminally attractive Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and a Norton 500 motorcycle nicknamed "La Poderosa," the powerful one, don't expect to put it on the shelf next to "Hells Angels on Wheels." This might be the quietest, most meditative motorcycle movie ever made.

On second thought, however, maybe it does belong on that shelf. Like riders everywhere, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado were changed by their bike experience, by the eight months they spent in 1952 going 8,000 South American miles, but not in the way they expected.

For significant historical figures — and Guevara, whether you consider him a beacon of truth or an example of what conservatives like to call "adolescent revolutionary romanticism," was indisputably that — are not all forged in caldrons of fire. As this soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent, ably demonstrates, transformation is no less convincing for being a gradual process that comes on its subjects all unawares.

Brazil's Walter Salles, best known for his 1998 "Central Station," was the right choice to direct a film that, knowing enough not to push too hard, simply unfolds in front of us. Salles' brand of straightforward naturalness comes off as effortless, but it is a lot harder to achieve than it looks.

A key element in this process is screenwriter José Rivera. Working in Spanish from books written by both participants, he avoids thunderous epiphanies in favor of catching quiet moments on the fly. His script helps us feel we're on the journey with these two men as they "explore a continent only known in books" and discover not only life but their place in it.

And then there is García Bernal, already a star due to "Y Tu Mamá También" and sure to get bigger after this and Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education." At 24, roughly the same age Guevara was when the trip began, he has the gift of unforced magnetism, the ability to make unselfconscious sensitivity heroic on screen.

Guevara has been done by everyone from Antonio Banderas in "Evita" to Omar Sharif (opposite Jack Palance's wacky Castro) in 1969's "Che!," but what makes this performance stand out is that it does not tip its hand. Because García Bernal has the sense and skill not to play Guevara like the great man in training, we get to see an individual learn and expand from experience, to tag along as purpose gradually reveals its inexorable hand to him.

Nothing anywhere nearly this serious is in the offing when these two young men begin Alberto and Ernesto's Excellent Adventure. They will leave their native Argentina, head north through Chile, Peru and Colombia and end up in Venezuela at the top of the continent. "This isn't a tale of heroic feats," Guevara's voice-over says at the outset, setting the tone. "It's two lives running parallel with common aspirations and dreams." Like, it turns out, finding girlfriends in every country they visit.

Of course, it doesn't work out quite that way for Granado (Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna), a 29-year-old pharmacist whose bluster conceals a good heart, and Guevara, at 23 one semester away from his medical degree. Though he came from a politically aware family (something the film does not mention), Guevara had yet to evince interest in social issues.

The journey begins with a visit to Guevara's sweetheart Chichina (Mía Maestro) and her stuffy landed-gentry family, and then gets going in earnest. Or at least as much in earnest as these two guys can manage.

For it turns out that mishaps will characterize this trip as much as anything more purposeful. The travelers' tent blows away, they ineffectually chase women and scrounge for food, they take so many destructive spills the mighty Norton has to be abandoned, and the journey, amid much bickering, continues via walking, hitchhiking and the occasional passenger ferry.

Whereas Granado's conniving presence remains a constant, the sensitive Guevara subtly changes. He's always an idealist, someone who almost cannot tell a lie, a determined man whose inner toughness has been forged through a battle with debilitating bouts of asthma, but his travels give greater scope to a burning compassion and a slowly growing anger at injustice.

Because the deeper these men get into their journey, especially on foot, the more serious things get, the more the continent's problems of poverty, expropriation and exploitation quietly but steadily reveal themselves. An extended stay at a leper colony on the Amazon in Peru (leprosy was an area of specialization for both men) is the emotional climax of that journey, and of the film.

Put together by a multinational cast and crew, "Diaries" was especially fortunate in its French cinematographer, Eric Gautier. He shot in a combination of 35-millimeter for impressive landscapes and Super 16 for its ability to give the film an authentic eye for indigenous faces, like the small boy in Cuzco, Peru, who gleefully describes the differences between the Incas and the "in-capables," the incapable Spaniards who came after.

Though it's not in the film, one of Guevara's most often quoted sentiments is that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." It is the triumph of "The Motorcycle Diaries" that it movingly presents the person who believed that sentiment and shows us just how and why he came to feel that way.
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Another critic
Before he was executed by a Bolivian firing squad in 1967, Argentina's Ernesto Che Guevara had become (at the side of Fidel Castro) an icon of guerrilla warfare, a killer in a beret who celebrated hatred as the key to revolution. That image of Che (a name he acquired later in life) has been co-opted by everyone from rockers to ad whores. But you won't find him in The Motorcycle Diaries, a mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.

The impetus for this enlightenment is a 1952 motorcycle trip that Ernesto (Gael Garc'a Bernal), then 23, took with his biochemist pal Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), 29. Jose Rivera based his script on the diaries both men kept of their eight-month trip through South America (from the snows of the Andes to the heat of the Amazon. Cheers to Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of 1998's Central Station, for keeping the focus intimate and thrillingly immediate.

A good part of the film's power is the way it sneaks up on you. The boys are sniffing out adventure, not an odyssey that will change their lives. Ernesto has been living large in Buenos Aires. He stops off at a resort for a fast hookup with his girl (Mia Maestro). The tart-chasing Alberto just wants to get laid. Neither man is a paragon of Easy Rider cool. For starters, they're riding Alberto's junk bike, a 1939 Norton 500 he calls the Mighty One. Salles gets terrific comic mileage out of the bike, especially when it breaks down and forces the guys to hitchhike or journey on foot.

It's the slowing of the trip that gives Ernesto and Alberto a chance to observe the starving workers and the politically oppressed they encounter in Chile, Peru and Venezuela. Whenever possible, Salles shot in the actual locations, letting us see what the protagonists saw, including the remnants of the Incan culture in Machu Picchu.

Most moving of all is the visit to the San Pablo leper colony in the Amazon. Ernesto feels an instant connection with the lepers. It galls him that the patients and the hospital staff live on opposite sides of the river. His night swim (gasping for breath with each stroke) to join the lepers is the film's true climax.

Salles has already taken heat from critics who think the compassionate Ernesto doesn't jibe with the executioner he became when he and Castro took down the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959. That Che will be the subject of a planned Steven Soderbergh film, starring Benicio Del Toro. But look closer at the scenes Salles seems to catch on the fly, such as Ernesto throwing a stone at a mining truck carrying men to exploitative labor, and you see how quickly romantic ideals can harden into brutal ideology.

The actors meet the film's challenges every step of the way. De la Serna finds the humor and the messy humanity in Alberto, who joined Ernesto in Cuba and makes an appearance, at age eighty-two, in the film's coda. The Mexican Bernal, far from the erotic romp of Y Tu Mama Tambien, gives a breakthrough performance, playing Ernesto like a gathering storm. In his published diaries, Che wrote, "I'll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be." In this wild ride of a movie that is part epic poem and part political provocation, it's that man who holds the screen as a portent of history.