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Topic: The Motorcycle Diaries
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 10-03-2004 08:13 PM
This excellent Spanish language film,is based on the diaries kept by Ernesto (Che) Guevarra and his friend Alberto Granado on a motorcycle adventure from Buenos Aires through the Andes into Chile, Equador and Peru. Ernesto was 23, a medical student nearing his final exams, and Alberto a chemist of 29.
Their adventures form a comic, quixotic first half of the film, while the second half becomes more serious, as Che reacts to the poverty, exploitation and disease of the peasants they encounter.I thought of both "Easy Rider" and "Y Tu Mama Tambien."
I felt well prepared for this film, having recently viewed the slides a friend took on an archaeological tour of Machu Pichu
and watched the PBS series "The Conquisadores." The scenes in the leper colony reminded me of Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Africa, while the scenes on the riverboat seemed straight out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Love in the Time of Cholera" and his biography "Vivir Para Contarla."
Most unforgettable are the faces of the indigenous Indians, dispossesed farmers and unemployed miners. The long shots of the Andes and the Amazon are quite beautiful. The principals are excellent actors, and the people they encounter are very believably portrayed.
The main character is called by his nickname Fusel until in Chile he takes the name Che, because of the his Argentine accent.
I found some scenes painful to watch, such as his prolonged asthmatic attacks, so very realistically acted. And there was pathos in his motorcycle spills.
The film ends with Che Guevarra's leaving for home, having to decide whether to complete his medical studies and join the safe middle-class family while an inner sympathy with those facing poverty and injustice pulls him in another direction.
His later travels to other South American countries and Cuba, and his murder with the complicity of the C.I.A. are written in Spanish text with only the briefest English sub-titles.
This film helped me understand the extraordinary appeal Che Guevarra had and still has among many young people worldwide, including those with no sympathy for Fidel Castro or the Cuban revolution. His "birthday" speech before leaving the leper colony expresses a dream like that of Simon Bolivar, who hoped to unite all the lands from Tierra del Fuego to the U.S. border into a single Spanish-speaking country, instead of the fractured collection of separate nationalism it became following the anti-colonial wars against Spain.
Screened at Kew Gardens Cinema 10/03/04. Applause at end,
and a stranger grabbed my arm and said "What a great film!" at
the credits.
[ 10-06-2004, 03:18 PM: Message edited by: Gerard S. Cohen ]
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