Motorcycle Diaries

Few books affected me more than Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries in my younger years. The book inspired both wanderlust and an everlasting adoration for Che. It also helped form my own ideology and political judgment when I was still ultimately apolitical. Years passed and the book has been staying on my shelf collecting dust, while I traveled much of South and Central America and felt strangely home in all these remote countries I would never have imagined to set my feet on. I could only say that all these adventures, all these affinities to a vast continent so different from my own, probably started from this small magic book.So when I heard the book was adapted into a movie by Brazilian director Walter Sallers, it became the most waited film of the year for me. I was afraid the movie would destroy all those imaginations built through the years (with backdrop landscapes culled from my own traveling), but a visualization of that enchanting and strenuous journey is also very appealing and exciting (especially with Gael Garcia Bernal in it).

I finally watched the movie with a large group of friends, many of whom with Latin heritages. I walked out of the theatre with mixed feelings. The movie is almost just as good as I expected, yet I found it unsatisfying. Maybe the fault is the medium itself. In order to make a coherent movie, Sallers spent much of the time building up the plot and the characters and even ended the movie with a Hollywood-like triumphant crossing of the Amazon, many of which were not even mentioned in the original book. Sallers also took the liberty to cut and paste the diaries and rearrange the small anecdotes to make the story flow better. I don’t see this as a bad practice, but it certainly altered the existing pace and rhythm of the book. The voice-over is the best Saller can do to convey the tone of the book. Gone are the poetry and the cerebral reflections. But as visual medium, a film can also do what the book can’t do. Unfortunately Salles could only provide some breathtaking landscape without personal feelings. The movie sees what a usual traveler sees. It is not necessarily what Che had seen.

The problem could be that Salles may not be the best person to adapt a road story like this. It is too easy for him to trap us in the same sentimentality he was so good at in his earlier films (Central Stations). Just as the book, the movie has a light and comical air in the beginning but eventually took a somber turn once the protagonists got to Andes, but this turn was rather sudden and the witnessed miseries did not point well to the wakening of Che’s political conscience. The tears were simply too cheaply won. As a book, Motorcycle Diaries was much more than a tour of places or tour of hearts. Even if the movie tried hard to go beyond that, it did not succeed.

As a reference, I went back to reread the chapters in one of the best biography book “Che Guevara: A Revolutional Life”, written by Jon Lee Anderson. Salles clearly took some notes from the same pages since much of the highlights in the movie were all here (but not in the diaries). Two more observations: The final close-up of real-life Alberto (who is well into his 80s) reminds me of “Rabbit Proof Fence”, and the back-and-white stills of the workers and peasants and Indians seemed to come straight from end of “Mango Yellow”, another Brazilian film on working-class people in Recife.

Incidentally, as I am also finishing reading Garcia Marquez’s General in Labyrinth, I can not help but compare Che to Simon Bolivar. Both were ferocious fighters, poets, avid readers, and rigorous intellectuals. Both grew up in privileged families and traveled widely. Both died young and fought the whole life for a united America but failed miserably in the end, and both became martyrs to inspire millions to follow. Heroic and tragic, Che and Bolivar are unique to South America, to its tumultuous history and continuous struggling, to its melodramatic culture sensibilities and sentimentality, to its need for hopes, dreams, and optimism. As today’s extreme capitalism continues to divide the world into rich and poor and exhaust the world’s natural resources, we have more reasons to challenge the status quo and seek alternative solutions for a better and fairer society. Che would always to be the symbol of this idealism and this selfless search of the truth. The violence he resorted to has proved to be futile and unwise, but his high spirit and combatant energy would live on. As I stood outside the theatre and looked around and saw all those young inquisitive faces, I felt I was one of them.