The Motorcycle Diaries

That The Motorcycle Diaries is about Che Guevara is almost irrelevant. This film works with or without that knowledge. This is a road movie about two friends searching for America and for themselves. America here is South America. The two characters set out to travel around the South American continent with the eventual goal of visiting a leper colony on the Amazon River. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is a medical student specializing in the treatment of leprosy, while his friend Alberto Granado is a biochemist about to turn 30. Granado is thinking about taking a job and settling down, while Guevara is in love with a girl who offers him a comfortable domestic future.

Like many road movies this one is episodic, and much of the first half features various exploits Guevara and Granado have along the way. We are supposed to think of their journey as a last boyhood fling before they resign themselves to more conventional and adult activities. The film's tone is gently comic. At first Guevara is uptight and plays the straight man to Granado, who is adept at telling tall tales to convince mechanics to fix their motorcycle, women to love them, and old men to give them a place to sleep. Their motorcycle often breaks down, and during a storm their tent blows away. Gradually Guevara loosens up and is able to begin enjoying their experiences.

The tone changes when the pair make their way into Peru. Guevara receives a letter from his girl friend, who breaks off their relationship. They wreck the motorcycle for the last time and must make their way on foot. And as they move higher into the mountains of Peru on their way to Macchu Picchu, passing poverty-stricken Indians along the way, Guevara begins to notice the disparity between his own privileged life and the lives of the people they encounter. He and Granado spend time with a young couple who announce they had to leave home in order to avoid arrest--they are communists. The film is not especially subtle in showing this political awakening--but it is not overbearing either.

At the leper colony on the Amazon River, Guevara's awakening comes to fruition. The symbolic moment is his decision to swim across the Amazon, from the side where the doctors and nurses live to the side where the lepers live. In this symbolic moment, where he risks drowning, he signifies his allegiance with the dispossessed and downtrodden.

This is an important film for North Americans to see. It is first of all interesting to see the themes of a road movie, coming-of-age movie, applied to South American characters and settings. It is also interesting to see these themes applied in a way that makes comedy and sex seem of secondary importance--something of historical moment is in the offing here, the birth of an important political figure, or at least of a cultural icon--something important is happening. We don't often think of South America as a land of beauty, but this film celebrates the landscape.

Late in the film, as Guevara and Granado are departing the leper colony, Guevara gives an impromptu speech (a bit too deliberately) in which he says, "Even though we are too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only confirmed this belief, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America." Even more than the political awakening of Guevara, this statement expresses the film's real theme, its celebration of the South American land and people, and its argument against national, political, economic, and racial boundaries.

For North Americans, Guevara was at best a kind of counter-culture hero who since his death in 1967 has grown increasingly irrelevant--a failed revolutionary leader. For South Americans, he has remained more important, and this film helps to explain why as it builds and amplifies the myth. At the same time it humanizes Guevara—revealing his struggle with asthma, making light of his inability to dance and his moral rectitude—he refuses to lie under any circumstance.

This film reminded me of what it was like to be young in a country still beautiful and unsullied. It is based on Guevara’s own account of his journey across South America in the 1950s, and I look forward to reading the book, which, I understand, reveals a Guevara somewhat less perfect than the character of the film.