Hark, is that the icky post-Leaving Cert result sound of Blu-Tac being used to mount Che Guevara posters in thousands of newly occupied bed-sits? There are two major problems with being a romantic revolutionary. Firstly, one tends to get worshipped by everyone from the cool kids (good) to this week’s campus socialists (not so good). Secondly, one has to die young, not the most advantageous of situations, but the associated mystique can make for quite a career move.
Such is the legacy of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, doomed to be iconic in a tragically hip, meaningless way, while languishing alongside everyone’s favourite knife-wielding peacenik Bob Marley, joint in hand. Thankfully, Walter Salles’ (Behind the Sun, Central Station) excellent film does much to reclaim the man behind the T-shirt myth. The Motorcycle Diaries traces Ernesto’s (Bernal) formative student expedition around 1950s South America, a youthful folly on the back of a dilapidated Norton bike, together with rambunctious companion, Alberto (de la Serna), whose basic objective is to get laid in every town in America.
Early in the trip they evoke Don Quixote (and Lorca and Neruda – you impressed? Ooh, I was.), but the film’s trajectory is quite the opposite. Each stop is a dalliance with the bitter, harsh realities of life among indigenous people being displaced by corporations and “fortifications devoured by heartsease” to borrow a Garcimarquesism. Even more affecting is their sojourn in an Amazonian clinic for lepers, a place that inspires the delicate, asthmatic Guevara to make various selfless, reckless, and occasionally symbolic gestures.
Salles’ delicate handling of the central friendship yields a genuinely touching depiction of male bonding, while his portrait of the icon as a young man produces one enormously endearing screen hero – which presumably was the whole point of the exercise. Adventurous, honest, altruistic – fuck regular cool, this Guevara is shall-I-compare-thee-to-an-Arctic-day, I-may-not-be-back-for-some-time kind of cool. He’s good with people and puppies, his bedside manner is impeccable, and these near-celestial qualities are brilliantly nailed by Bernal’s (Bad Education, El Crimen del padre Amaro, Y tu mama tambien) deft tightrope walk between naivety and nobility.
Maybe it’s hagiography, but it really makes you wonder what Guevara, and by extension the South American geopolitical maelstrom, missed out on by his brutal execution. And that, perhaps, is the best compliment one can pay The Motorcycle Diaries. Although, all those close-ups of Gael’s heartstoppingly beautiful upper-lip ain’t bad either.