/ARTS WEEKLY/ FILM-BRAZIL: Motorcycle Ride with Che

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 22 2004 (IPS) - ”Forget about me when I turn 18 because I’m going to do the same as Che,” a 12-year-old boy in Brazil tells his mother after seeing ”The Motorcycle Diaries”, a film about the revolutionary leader Ernesto Guevara as a twenty-something – which has won applause from audiences in movie houses across the country.

Given the reaction, one might predict that backpackers will be crowding the South American route that the Argentine-born Guevara took in 1952. He was soon to turn 24 and probably never imagined that seven years later he would enter Havana as ”Che”, one of the leaders of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

The journey of then-medical student Ernesto with his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, extended more than 12,000 km from Argentina to Venezuela. It is the subject of the film directed by Brazil’s Walter Salles, but is a truly ”Latin American” story – and project.

The film is made in Spanish, Che’s own language, not Brazilian Portuguese. Its lead actors are Mexico’s Gael García Bernal, as Che, and Argentina’s Rodrigo de la Serna, as Granado. The Puerto Rican José Rivera wrote the adapted screenplay.

Salles himself says that in making this film he quit being a Brazilian director, and became ”Latin American”. The physical and human landscapes captured so well in the film’s images include Argentina and South America’s Andean nations. Nothing of Brazil.

In charge of the musical score, which is subtle but moving, was Gustavo Santaolalla, an Argentine composer who was initiated into the music world through rock, and now lives in the U.S. city of Los Angeles. He has been studying Latin American music for two decades.

He is a versatile guitarist who included in the score instruments typical of the different locations visited by Guevara and Granado. A song illustrating the end of the film, ”Al otro lado del río” (On the other side of the river), helps Brazilians get to know their neighbouring countries’ musicians – written and performed by Uruguayan singer- songwriter Jorge Drexler.

The film production involved five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Britain, but reached the big screen thanks to Robert Redford, famed U.S. actor and director who promotes good independent films with his annual Sundance Festival.

In the end, in the only speech Guevara makes, as he is expressing his appreciation for a birthday party at a Peruvian leper colony where the two travellers spend three weeks, he says he has determined that borders are artificial constructs. Latin America is one people, he says.

But that is not what moves the audiences so much. Often to tears. Some film critics say ”The Motorcycle Diaries” is an attempt to show Che as a young person who is different from the rest, predestined for a special role, his ”saintliness” and Christian altruism.

It is what stands out in the real internal revolution that he, with the help of Granado, foments in the leper colony lost in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon.

First he refuses the gloves that the doctors and nurses used ”by order of the nuns,” and he holds hands with the ill and embraces them. Che is ”pure tenderness that has not yet hardened… a hero of good works,” José Geraldo Couto, critic for the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo, wrote with irony.

Living among the leprosy sufferers, eating and playing football with them, convincing a young woman to undergo surgery to save her arm and overcome her suicidal tendencies are some of the actions that depict his Christian piety.

It all culminates when Guevara, an asthmatic from a comfortable middle- class upbringing in Argentina, swims hundreds of metres across an Amazon river to celebrate his birthday with the diseased, a gesture that condemns the apartheid that separates the leper colony even from the doctors.

It is clear what side Guevara has taken, and that the journey has served as an initiation, though not yet political. He confesses that he is a changed man, but that he needs to reflect on the injustices he has seen.

The film has its moments of laughter. The two friends leave Buenos Aires on a badly maintained motorcycle, but nicknamed ”La poderosa” (The powerful one). Later, after several spectacular wipeouts, the ”broken one” means they find themselves on foot in Chile.

Several events serve to underscore the uprightness of the young Guevara. The contrast is with Granado, a ”chanta”, which in Argentine slang refers to someone for whom a small lie is easier. Granado’s tongue and wit helps the two travellers get by despite their lack of money.

Contrasts are a key element of the film, which received a 13-minute ovation at the Cannes Festival, though it won no prizes from that jury. Awards came from parallel events like the Ecumenical Jury and the French Ministry of Culture.

The film’s most memorable image of Argentina, for example, is a mansion surrounded by gardens – ”Swiss” according to Granado – where lived some relatives of Guevara and his girlfriend. In the film, Che’s luxurious surroundings gradually deteriorate to the squalor of the leper colony.

Images practically superimposed of the ancient Incan ruins of Machu Picchu and of a Lima slum pose another contrast.

Black and white cinematography of the poor in the Andes and in the Amazon today underscore that the South American reality has changed little in 50 years.