The Motorcycle Diaries (Directed 2004), reviewed by Piers Mostyn
This film is based on the diary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara wrote during his 5,000-mile exploration of South America with best friend Alberto Granado in 1952. A medical student from a liberal bourgeois tamily, he radicalises en route.
I anticipated a buddy movie with glorious Andean landscapes. It is certainly an exquisitely shot romantic adventure. It telescopes the narrative into a series of escapades that gloss up on the original - skimping on the periods of inactivity and aimlessness.
But it is historically accurate. It avoids the temptation to play up to an audience fed on Che's iconography.
He is never referred to as "Che" and rarely as "Ernesto". Granado addresses him by the nickname "Fuser". His radicalisation is shown true to life and the diary treated in nuanced vignettes like the chance encounter with two blacklisted militants seeking work in the hell-hole of a giant Peruvian copper mine.
The film, accordingly, breaks through the image of Che the icon to portray Ernesto Guevara the human being.
Humanity and politics are fused in the climax when Guevara brushes aside the nuns' prohibition of physical contact with lepers in an Amazonian colony.
He throws himself into the community of the most despised and marginalised people and sets out a vision of an internationalist unity of the Americas with indigenous people at its heart.
Consistent with this vision, the cast is a multinational one from across Latin America. Director Salles's background is as leader of a new wave of Brazilian film-makers.
His great 1998 movie Central Station symbolised the contradictory re-awakening of radicalism in late 1990s Brazil.
In Che's later diaries his attempts to kick-start revolution in Africa and Bolivia in the 1960s make depressing reading. We know the outcome already: failure and death.
By that stage he knew he was writing for posterity, and though aware of the weaknesses of each enterprise, he nonetheless submitted through his diaries) his failings to critical scrutiny.
Contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre's description of him as the consummate perfect individual, the diaries show him as vulnerable and flawed and not simply as action-man.
Of the five published only one (based on his days in the Sierra Maestra) describes revolutionary success. The rest reflect him struggling to chart an uncertain course.
The diaries, like this film, show the process of revolutionary political radicalisation as a journey which is rarely perfect and may never be complete. But, in their humanity and honesty, they communicate to a new generation. letting the Arab regimes off the hook either. He quotes favourably Noam Chomsky saying
"Despite the remarkable level of US support for Israel it would be an error to assume that Israel represents the major Us interest in the Middle East. Rather the major interest lies in the energy reserves in the region, primarily in the Arabian peninsula.
"A State Department analysis of 1945 described Saudi Arabia as "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history" (The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians ,Cambridge, Mass, Southend Press, 2nd edition, p17).
One of my favourite pieces
as the scale of Eastern Cauldron the tasks
that lie ahead. "As Washington bogs down in a country that cannot be hidden from the world -unlike Afghanistan, more chaotic than ever - the anti-war movement will be able to rise to new heights. This movement's spectacular growth has only been possible because it rested on the foundations of three years of progress by the global movement against neoliberal globalisation, which was born in Seattle."These two dimensions will continue to feed each other, to strengthen people's awareness that neo-liberalism and war are two faces of the same system of domination - which must be overthrown."
page 24 of the scan
socialist www.socialistresistance.net No. 20. Nov-Dec 2004