Diarios de motocicleta

Walter Salles (2004)

In January 1952 two young Argentines left Buenos Aires to start what they planned to be a four-month, 8,000-kilometre journey across South America.  Their conveyance was the sputtering Norton 500 motorcycle – misnomer La Poderosa (‘The Mighty One’) – belonging to Alberto Granado, the elder of the pair.  Alberto, approaching his thirtieth birthday, was a biochemist.  His twenty-three-year-old companion, Ernesto Guevara, was a semester away from completing his medical degree.  As well as touring Argentina, Chile and Peru, heading for a final destination in Venezuela, the duo, according to Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, set off with objectives carnal and clinical.  One of their first stopping points is the family home of Ernesto’s girlfriend Chichina (Mía Maestro) and Alberto means to sleep with as many women as possible before he’s thirty but he and Ernesto, when they reach Peru, will work for several weeks as volunteers at a leper colony on the banks of the Amazon.  The marathon journey takes longer than expected – thanks largely to the frailties of The Mighty One, which they’re forced to abandon en route – and entails a greater distance.  Ernesto, especially, travels a long way.  When he and Alberto eventually say goodbye at Caracas airport (Alberto has decided to take up an internship at a hospital in the city), Ernesto tells his friend that ‘Something happened – something that I have to think about long and hard – so much injustice…’  Ernesto boarded a plane back to Buenos Aires, received his medical degree in 1953 and then became Che Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries was Guevara’s posthumously published account of his travels with Granado.  For a while, José Rivera’s (deservedly Oscar-nominated) screenplay for Salles’s film regularly quotes from the memoir and from letters Ernesto wrote home to his mother.  It’s not unusual for films to use voiceover both to set the scene and to find their feet, dispensing with it when the narrative no longer needs such help.  In this case, the tapering off of voiceover means more.  It conveys a sense of Ernesto’s changing perspective, that he’s no longer satisfied regaling his upper-middle-class family with essentially conventional description of his travels.  Salles and Rivera highlight, without undue emphasis, the socio-economic conditions that shaped Ernesto’s nascent Marxism and particular encounters that stimulated his activism.  Nearly wherever they go, he and Alberto witness peasants living a hand-to-mouth existence.  In Chile, a man and wife virtually outlawed because of their communist beliefs are two in a crowd of people looking for work at a local copper mine; Ernesto is enraged by the mine bosses’ peremptory sheep-and-goats selection of labour.  He has previously told Alberto that the fifteen US dollars Chichina gave him are ‘off limits’ as spending money.  He doesn’t tell Alberto, until much later, that he has given the dollars to the communist couple.   It’s implied that Ernesto receives a lot more from them in terms of political education.

On a visit to Machu Picchu, his crystallising revolutionary thoughts find clearer voice.  The Incan ruins spark reflections, on Alberto’s part as well as Ernesto’s, on how an ancient, indigenous civilisation was displaced by a modern culture that is inhumane and soul-destroying.  Alberto may be romancing when he says, ‘I’ll marry an Inca descendant – we’ll start an indigenous party … reactivate Túpac Amaru’s revolution, the Indo-American revolution’.  Ernesto is deadly serious in replying, ‘A revolution without guns?  It would never work’.  Much of the time, though, The Motorcycle Diaries is more entertaining road movie than earnest polemic.  There are spills from the motorbike, dust-ups with nearly-cuckolded husbands, short-lived spats between Ernesto and Alberto, irreverent remarks to nuns who help run the San Pablo leper colony.  A shipboard episode in which out-of-funds Alberto wins money in a game of blackjack to pay for the services of a glamorous sex worker (Jackelyne Vásquez) is very funny.

The two lead performances are entirely successful.  Although he isn’t a close facial likeness for Guevara, Gael García Bernal has just the right combination of qualities for the role.  His boylike presence conveys a sense of Ernesto’s innocence; his keen, observant aspect animates the young man’s intellectual alertness.  Guevara was severely asthmatic throughout his life and Bernal’s slenderness underlines Ernesto’s physical vulnerability:  the acute asthma attack he suffers on the ship taking him and Alberto to San Pablo is alarming.  At the same time, Bernal is thoroughly convincing as Guevara the vigorously competitive sportsman.  His aggressive play on the rugby field earned him the nickname ‘Fuser’, a conflation of furibondo (furious) and de la Serna, his mother’s maiden name.

That’s what Alberto habitually calls his friend and it’s an amusing coincidence that he’s played by an actor with the same surname.  Rodrigo de la Serna’s plump, easily sociable, genuinely ingratiating Alberto vitally complements Bernal’s wiry, thoughtful Ernesto, who cannot tell a lie.  The travellers’ first Peruvian host is Hugo Pesce (Gustavo Bueno), a distinguished physician and a would-be novelist.  He insists that his guests read the unpublished manuscript; to Alberto’s embarrassment, Ernesto regretfully advises the benevolent Dr Pesce to stick to the day job.  Rodrigo de la Serna is expert as the chubby, sometimes clumsy clown but no less believable as a capable scientist and organiser.  It’s Alberto who’s arranged in advance the stay with Pesce and the subsequent engagement at the leper colony with Dr Bresciani (Jorge Chiarella) and his team.

The protagonists’ relationship doesn’t develop much in the course of the story.  While this is true enough to Guevara’s retrospective description of their odyssey as a tale not ‘of heroic feats’ but ‘of two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams’, it also hints at a larger lack of dramatic substance to The Motorcycle Diaries.  The film depends considerably on – and is fortified by – the viewer’s foreknowledge of what happened to Ernesto in the years that followed.  The face of his mother Celia (Mercedes Morán), as she bids her eldest son farewell in the opening sequence, expresses fear that she may never see him again.  Celia’s look carries an immediate emotional charge because we already know that, in an important sense, her fear was justified, even though not literally.

The end of the stint in San Pablo coincides with Ernesto’s twenty-fourth birthday, and a party is organised to mark both occasions. The place has, from the start, served as a potent analogue to the haves-and-have-nots dichotomy that increasingly preoccupies Ernesto:  the medical facility and the leper colony are separated by the Amazon.  The volunteers’ refusal to wear rubber gloves when in direct physical contact with the lepers is not only an expression of medical conviction (the disease isn’t contagious, except, and then rarely, in cases of prolonged contact) but also, for Ernesto, of a deeper solidarity.  At the party, in response to a birthday toast, he takes his audience by surprise, telling them that ‘the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction … we are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits’.  Ernesto asks the gathering to raise their glasses to ‘Peru and to a United America’; they uncertainly do so.  Soon after, he determines to spend his last night in San Pablo not in the relative comfort of the medics’ quarters but in the leper colony.  In a show of almost demented determination, he decides to swim the width of the Amazon.  It’s a life-risking, scarily wheezing struggle but he succeeds.

This symbolic effort is the highly effective climax to the film.  It’s a pity that, in the few remaining minutes of screen time, Salles and Rivera over-stress their admiration for the hero.   That reference to ‘so much injustice’ in Ernesto’s parting words to Alberto at the airport is the prelude to a montage of images of impoverished people who’ve appeared earlier in the story.  (These stills are black-and-white although the rest of the film, photographed by Eric Gautier, is in colour.)  The montage paves the way for a surfeit of closing captions, summarising Che’s leadership of the Cuban Revolution, his guerrilla exploits in the Congo, his capture in Bolivia, his CIA-sanctioned murder in 1967.  The history textbook finale is redeemed somewhat by footage of the actual, elderly Alberto Granado who, at his old friend’s invitation, came to work in Castro’s Cuba in 1960, founded a medical school there, and still ‘lives in Havana with his wife Delia, their children and grandchildren’.  (Granado died, in his late eighties, in 2011.)

It was good to see this film a second time.  Walter Salles had previously made documentaries for the most part and it’s presumably by choice that he has directed few dramatic features since 2004:  his disappointing version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (2012), also with a screenplay by José Rivera, is still the most recent.  The Motorcycle Diaries skilfully integrates virtually documentary material.  What might be termed the community musical sequences – a gathering in a Chilean village hall where a band plays (the vocalist, Maria Esther Zamora, is a vivid performer), the party in San Pablo – are particularly strong.  And Salles orchestrates very smoothly the playing of his professional actors and the numerous ‘non-actors’ in the cast (‘We encountered them on the road and incorporated them,’ he simply explained in a September 2004 Sight & Sound interview).

Gustavo Santaolalla’s supple and appealing score crazily didn’t get nominated at the Oscars but did win that year’s BAFTA (and Santaolalla won consecutive Oscars in the next two years, for Brokeback Mountain and Babel).  Music in The Motorcycle Diaries did win an Academy Award, however:  ‘Al Otro Lado Del Río’, composed and sung on the soundtrack by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, was named Best Original Song.  As usual, each of the nominated songs was performed at the Oscars show.  Its producers, according to the Spanish newspaper El País, wouldn’t let Drexler do the honours because he wasn’t well enough known to the American television audience (Antonio Banderas duetted with Carlos Santana).  Jorge Drexler had the last word(s), though – his acceptance speech comprised a couple of lilting, a cappella verses of his winning song.

10 September 2022