Director:
Walter Salles
Starring:
Gael García Bernal
Rodrigo De la Serna
Mía Maestro
Mercedes Morán
Jorge Chiarella
Release: 24 Sep. 04
IMDb
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The Motorcycle Diaries
BY: DAVID PERRY
Walter Salles mostly makes stuffy, overdrawn caricatures of
the mistreatment of South Americans, exiled by family, culture, nation, and
self. They are usually wanderers who have found some confidant to help them
on their way to finding themselves, and their journeys come as pedantic
treatises from Salles neo-Marxist politics. One of the most amazing feats by
Alfonso Cuarón in Y Tu Mamá También is that he succeeded in making the film
Salles has failed at making for a decade.
So comes The Motorcycle Diaries, a film in which Walter Salles uses Cuarón’s
ideas to pose his own past statements. Again, the story is of trip through
Central America as two young boys grow into the fully defined men who will
go home. But the twist is that one of the men is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the
revolutionary figure in Cuba’s communist takeover. Played by Gael García
Bernal, Julio from Y Tu Mamá También, the young Guevara is an apolitical
figure at the beginning of his motorcycle journey up the eastern coast of
South America with friend Alberto Granado. The people he meets on the way,
though, are those who struggled (and, in many cases, still do) under the
South American regimes, many embracing a totalitarian form of capitalism,
and their stories of starvation, homelessness, and illness, change him into
the proletariat champion of the Cuban Revolution.
It’s a not a complete view of Guevara, which is part of the reason why The
Motorcycle Diaries work so well. This isn’t necessarily a film about the
radical, but about the forming of a revolutionary. Watching it was like
watching The Grapes of Wrath, with its humanitarian sociological questions
posed to the post-Depression audience. The sidebars of the film are integral
to Guevara’s awakening exactly because they are the forgotten masses who’ve
been lost in the free enterprise of South America’s corrupt businessmen and
governments. For the first time, Salles’ own convictions are fully defined
in a film, and, as the film concludes on an emotionally perfect touch
(accompanied by Gustavo Santaolalla’s amazing score), he becomes a
successful radical in his own right.
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