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Y TU REVOLUTIONARY TAMBIEN
Walter Salles takes us across Latin America with a young Che.
By Dylan Behan.
Faithfully bringing the adolescent backpacking adventures of revolutionary icon Che Guevara to the screen was always going to be a challenge for Brazilian director Walter Salles. The man behind the 1998 Oscar nominated Central Station (also a film about a pair of broke travellers hiking across Latin America) had to try and balance the representation of a man revered by both posing fashionistas and philosophical Zapatistas alike. "Guevera is a much richer, much more quieter character that you would get from looking at the t-shirt," Salles quips on the phone from Los Angeles, and he says what directly appealed to him was bringing a side of Guevara to the screen which most people didn't know existed.
"If you read the book you're surprised by the humour that it has, the very honest form of storytelling. And you never associate these qualities with historical figures who became iconic characters later, and it was exactly what you didn't know about him."
But rather than making it a total political polemic, Salles approached it as a journey of discovery, relatable to any young person. "It was about the awakening of these two young men, it was about the unreeling of a whole human and physical geography that was unknown to them... It has to do with these moments in ones life when there will be a before and an after. As you say in English, of rupture, that would define whatever would come later."
Set in 1952, Ernesto Guevara (Gael Garcia Banal), a 23 year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, sets out on the trip of a lifetime with fellow pharmacy student Alberto Granada (played by Argentinian Rodrigo De La Serno). With no plan other than to see their own unknown continent, they climb aboard "the mighty one" (a beat up old 1939 motorcycle) hoping to get to Venezuela in time for Alberto's thirtieth birthday. When the bike disintegrates after running into a cow in Peru, the two set out on foot, winding their way through the historically significant (yet economically depressed) Andes mountains and the Atamaca Desert, before eventually landing work at South America's largest leper colony in San Pablo, on the shores of the Amazon.
Shot in an almost documentary style with a mobile crew, Salles has amazingly distilled the awe that the two characters, both upper-middle class med students, would have had stumbling through their own inequality-ridden continent, which has largely not changed in fifty years. Salles spent two years researching the project, which included doing the trip twice in pre-production, and when he was shooting, he had untrained local people and locations interact with cast almost as if the camera wasn't there.
"The way to be safe with this experience was in fact to film it as if was happening, as if it was unfolding under your eyes as we progressed. We basically tried to do that... We tried to experience that kind of impression of discovery that the book had into the film."
However, it's a journey of discovery that almost didn't happen. It was only with funding from Robert Redford's Sundance Institute and Britain's Film Four (or el Film Four as the credits say) that the film got off the ground. Hollywood was not scared off by the controversial main character however, but more by the unpredictable script. "The financiers in the US always mentioned the lack of an overt conflict driving the characters," notes Salles, currently working on projects in Hollywood. "And in fact, what they didn't perceive is that conflict is basically an internal one, and it has to do with the way the characters change as they went further and further into the heart of the continent that was unknown to them."
Having already played to an estimated audience of eighty million people around the world, is Salles worried that the isolated path Guevara took will turn into a tourist route?
"To travel is to go back to the essence of things, and therefore if people pick up a backpack and take a trip through Latin America and really interact with the persons who live and try and understand them, then this will be for the better. But then there are also those who try to find the same comfort of their home wherever they go to, and then these people are hopeless. Take a look at what happened to George Bush when he went for the first time to Italy. It was his first time ever in Rome and after the plane landed he went and took all his advisers to McDonalds. That tells it all."
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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Based upon Che's own posthumously published diary of the same name (and travel companion Alberto Granado's book With Che Through Latin America), The Motorcycle Diaries is part Lonely Planet travel adventure, party coming of age story and part political biography.