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The Motorcycle Diaries ("Diarios de motocicleta") (http://www.motorcyclediaries.net/) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318462/)
Directed by Walter Salles
FilmFour
R / Brazil:12 / Finland:K-7
2004
Reviewed by a contributor
This movie review is not going to be a review of Che Guevara's politics. MIM has already done that.(1) The question here is, why wasn't there a movie made about the young Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, or Jiang Qing, Norman Bethune, etc., and why didn't one come out in 2004 in the united $nakes.
Of course, all of these particular revolutionaries were less advanced politically when they were younger (not as a matter of being young, but because they had some mistaken ideas first). Lenin wasn't destined from birth to be a revolutionary. The whole point of talking about the "young" this or that is to talk about the respective persyn's ideological development. There is nothing wrong with depicting people's mistakes in order to contrast the mistakes with their later, or others', correct political and ideological line. It is also useful to show how some exploiters can break with their classes' ideologies. However, it is maybe even more important to show how people can lose or distort their correct ideas after they get them.
It is in this context that "The Motorcycle Diaries" fails. Most viewers, and the movie itself in several different ways, go into the theater with some idea about who Che is, and anticipate Ernesto Guevara's becoming a revolutionary and a hero. Che's known future is always in the background. It is both exciting and sad to see Guevara (Gael García Bernal) leaving his family in Buenos Aires to go on his tour of Latin America. Supposedly, this is when he starts to change(2). Guevara is shown progressing from political naivete, apathy, and goofy romantic attachment (to Chichina Ferreyra, played by Mía Maestro), toward being an anti-imperialist and even a socialist who recognizes the need for revolutionary armed struggle. The thing is, when Che was murdered in Bolivia, in 1967, he theoretically may have been less correct than when, as the movie shows, he was talking with and helping Communists in Chile, learning from indigenous children and wimmin in Peru, and engrossed in reading José Carlos Mariátegui. The real problem is the movie's directionality. At the end of Che's life, he was theoretically on the downswing, having failed to correct his mistakes. However, the movie paints Che's ideological development as being a linear progress from ignorance to consciousness through simply exposing himself to exploited and oppressed people, and books given to him by intellectuals. He goes from being imperfect, allegedly due to his bourgeois class origin, to being perfect. The movie ends in the middle of this fictional process and leaves the audience with the impression that Guevara didn't have to actively struggle with his own mistaken ideas. He saw the poor people. He read the books. And then he saw the light and became a budding martyr. Far from struggling with Guevara, Guevara's traveling companion Alberto Granado, who admires the Russian Revolution, is made to look ridiculous next to Guevara with all of Granado's silly sexual and other antics.
A movie that depicts a revolutionary's "youthful stage" isn't automatically revolutionary or even progressive. We have to weigh the negative elements of the movie against the positive. In fact, "The Motorcycle Diaries" would have been better, or less confusing, without the part about Che. (Yes, then we would be out of another Che movie, but go with me here.) "The Motorcycle Diaries" makes a point of showing how imperialism oppresses different nationalities in Latin America. We see the u.$. Anaconda Mining Company exploiting and abusing workers, and we see the ruins and remnants of Inca society. (What would Latin America look like today if it weren't for colonial and imperialist plundering?) There is exploitation going on between lackey, bourgeois, proletarian and other classes, and different nationalities, within Latin American countries. Sympathetic portrayals of Communists are featured prominently in the movie and up until the end. In one humorous scene, we see Ernesto and his friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) struggling up a hill while an indigenous worker carrying a load easily overtakes them. (The friends don't know what real hard work is.)
These are things that young people in imperialist countries need to see—without the added complication that the movie is about some popular, commodified, masculine revolutionary hero whose writings they probably have never read(3). What's good about "The Motorcycle Diaries" has little to do with the depiction of Guevara himself, but with the movie's depictions of exploited and oppressed people. It's just that their story is being told from the viewpoint of Guevara and Granado. At times, for example, when Guevara encounters the Quechua-speaking indigenous wimmin, "The Motorcycle Diaries" seems like a real-life documentary of contemporary Latin America. This is good. The movie should bear an uncanny resemblance to reality because super-exploitation and starvation deaths continue to exist in Latin American countries today.
This reviewer was surprised to see so few minors in the audience; although, "The Motorcycle Diaries" is "rated R for language" (MPAA). Coupled with its limited showing in the united $tates, "The Motorcycle Diaries" might not leave a big impact on youth in the united $tates. So, what do most Euro-Amerikan adults get out of watching a movie about a persyn whose "actual philosophy" Roger Ebert has irritatedly described as being "repressive and authoritarian?"
As several reviewers have put it, the movie "humanizes" Che, which is sometimes just a twisted way of slandering Che as a "dictator" who needs to be understood like other dictators. Obviously, "The Motorcycle Diaries" has a different meaning when seen by oppressed nationalities in Latin America, but we have to wonder what's going on when people go into u.k. and u.$. theaters with a taken-for-granted understanding of Che's politics and see a largely sentimental movie about how his politics came to be what they are.
"The Motorcycle Diaries" deserves a slightly better than neutral rating—"slightly" because movies like this are a brain-drain on unorganized communist-leaning youth in imperialist countries. But, hey, "The Motorcycle Diaries" is a lot better than "Die Another Day" (2002).
Gender
This reviewer doesn't know enough about Alberto Granada to talk about whether he was actually a hornball as depicted in the movie. Suffice it to say that this movie does little to show what gender oppression is other than simply depicting some Third World wimmin in certain roles, for example, domestic service and sex work.
When Chichina Ferreyra gives Guevara US$15 to buy her a stylish bikini in the united $tates, revolutionary feminists aren't going to cry over this. In fact, upper-crust Chichina may be a gender oppressor if she benefits from patriarchy overall, because of sex discrimination in occupations and wages in Argentina and elsewhere in the world market, her household's employment of domestic servants, and other factors. The indigenous children and wimmin depicted in the movie, on the other hand, are clearly oppressed by both imperialism and patriarchy.
Notes
1. "Che's Congo adventure," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/books/africa/checongo.html ; "Cuba: the Maoist view," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/countries/cuba/ ; also see MIM's various writings on focoism, including those in MIM Notes #47 and MIM Theory #5.
2. Marcelo Ballve, 2004 September 21, "Remembering Che and the Guevaras," Pacific News Service, http://imdcontentnew.searchease.com/villages/hispanic/arts_culture_media/pns_che_geuvara_0904.asp
3. For starters, http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/index.htm ; http://www.marxists.org/espanol/guevara/index.htm