The Motorcylce Diaries: Celluloid Che(mistry) at Last?

By Bilal Hashmi

“Let the world change you…and you can change the world,” reads the tagline for Brazilian director Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004), released on DVD in early 2005. The film, which has gone on to win several distinctions at international film festivals, chronicles an ambitious 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna's eight-month journey across the Latin American continent with his compañero, Alberto Granado, in 1952. Viewers are literally taken in for a ride when the two climb aboard the latter's rusty motorcylce, a 1939 Norton 500 – aptly named "La Poderosa", or "The Mighty One" – and embark on a trip that would change their lives forever, and perhaps alter the course of world history.

And yet, anyone even remotely acquainted with the region's political landscape over the last half century, or with the iconic status of Ernesto "Che" Guevara – both the man and the myth – should immediately take note of at least two major problems with this otherwise exceptional adaptation. The first concerns the intellectual maturation of the young Che who, despite his nearly apolitical portrayal in the film, was, at the time he wrote the travelogue upon which this production is based, flirting at least ambivalently with some very radical ideas, particularly in the realms of political change and his – at times troubling – conceptions of "a single mestizo race which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographic similarities" (149). The second contention students of history will perhaps have with the film revolves around the tagline mentioned above, which one fears graces the cover of the DVD precisely because the meaning of the statement does not evidently come across as being clear in the film itself.

While the fact has unfortunately escaped the attention of many a film critic, The Motorcylce Diaries is an adaptation of a historical document, namely Che Guevara’s written account of his landmark tour of the continent before he became the “soldier of the Americas” the world knows him as today. That Che returned as a changed man is very clear; and, in fact, he would subsequently refer to the journey as milestone of sorts in the development of his revolutionary thinking. But there is an aspect of Salles’ film that resists the very possibility of a Che capable of forming concrete political opinions, such as the one in the following instance, which appears in both the text and film, but with much less emphasis in the latter:

How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works (70-71).

This is a very moving sequence, in both the travelogue and the film, in which Che is asked to treat an old, bedridden woman in Valparaíso for whom death is imminent, as she does not possess the means to pay for otherwise accessible medical treatment. Che’s humanity here is expressed remarkably in filmic terms, but the explicitness of the above statement can hardly be conjectured. Take, for instance, Che’s prophetic remarks concerning the political climate of the same country, also difficult to grasp in the film’s significantly less pronounced political ethos:

The biggest effort Chile should make is to shake its uncomfortable Yankee friend from its back, a task that for the moment at least is Herculean, given the quantity of dollars the United States has invested and the ease with which it flexes its economic muscle whenever its interests appear threatened (89).

When one takes into consideration the relevance Che’s observation was to have almost exactly two decades later in the circumstances surrounding the tragic fall of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, it is difficult not to interpret this statement as a testament to a mind already reflecting deeply on the political currents running through Latin America. And yes, despite what is often referred to as his great love for the poor and suffering around the world, the exemplary figure of Tricontinentalism of this past century – at least at an earlier stage in his life – held some extremely bleak and disturbing views regarding the racial composition of the region:

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles (161).

To suggest that a successful adaptation must somehow dramatize all of the intricacies of the travelogue is not only unimaginative, but also nearly impossible; rather, what one would have liked to see was a more realistic Che, one who was – as most historical personalities inevitably are – likeable in some of his views and not in others, an engaged intellectual as well as a carefree vagabond. This, of course, is not immediately clear in the film, and regrettably so, especially when one considers the much-exaggerated leper colony sequence in which our protagonist is shown as a man for all seasons – an affectionate physician, skillful athlete and powerful orator. Of course, this is not to say that he could not have been all of these and more; but there is a sense of scepticism that is difficult to suppress while viewing a film that purports so forcefully to document an individual in the process of transformation.

All in all, Gael Garcia Bernal – of the Y tu Mamá También (2001) fame – puts on a convincing performance as the soon-to-become Latin American revolutionary leader, although one occasionally wonders why his attire, for the most part, lacks the historical accuracy of his companion's, played with equal grace by newcomer Rodrigo de la Serna. The highlights of the travelogue are for the most part skillfully transplanted into the dialogues of the film. But it is as a visual spectacle that The Motorcycle Diaries is most remarkable.

Apart from blending a masterful array of Latin America’s scenic landscapes, the film’s musical score is perhaps its greatest technical feat. Indeed, Gustavo Santaolalla’s brilliant composition captures the subtle resonance of the journey, paving the way as it were for the cacophonous reverberations of a revolution not unlike the Cuban one Che was to play an instrumental role in less than a decade later. I was hardly surprised to find out that the 2005 Oscar The Motorcylce Diaries won was not for best foreign film but for Jorge Drexler’s "Al Otro Lado Del Río," in the category of “Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures.”

This aspect of the film is given some attention in “Music On the Road,” an interview with Santaolalla, which makes up one of the bonus features of the DVD. Apart from a short featurette explaining the making of the film and a collection of mediocre deleted scenes that live up to their name, there are two supplements that are worth watching. The first of these is a revealing interview with Alberto Granado, who also makes an appearance at the end of the film. The other - included perhaps for reasons obvious in terms of marketing - is an intimate “Tomo Uno” segment with Bernal in which the young actor shares his views on Che’s influence on his life and the lives of subsequent generations of Latin American youth.

"Our film is about a young man, Che, falling in love with a continent and finding his place in it," asserts Walter Salles, the director of The Motorcycle Diaries. Thinking about the adaptation on the whole, one feels that this message could perhaps have been rendered much more effectively had the dynamics of the continent been given a greater presence on the screen. For it was this very continent that accepted Che and Alberto with open arms even though the two, on several occasions, took advantage of the very hosts without whom neither could have made it through their journey alive. It would, after all, be an equally receptive Latin America – at least a significant portion of it – that would once again respond to the knock on its door in the not-too-distant future.

Works Cited

Guevara, Ernesto. The Motorcylce Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey. trans.
and ed. Alexandra Keeble (New York: Ocean Press, 2003).