Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

I was going to write about this for quite some time now but always managed to forget at the last minute. Well, it's about one of the best movies I saw last year--The Motorcycle Diaries. It was simply a phenomenal movie about the adventures of Che Guevara and his friend, Alberto Granado, traversing the vast breathtaking landscape of South America from the bustling Buenos Aires to the serenity of the haciendas, snaking through the treacherous peaks of the Andes to trudging along the great Amazon till they reached the tip of the continent in Venezuela.

What's really amazing about the film is its subdued and well-tempered political tones despite the fact that the main character is the larger-than-life figure that assumes a mythical stature among the Left, besides the usual bunch of hardcore Rage Against The Machine fans. The Brazilian director, Walter Salles, who also directed another great Oscar-winning film, Central Station, was particularly adept in sketching the image of young Che and the development of his ideals without resorting to overt socio-political commentary, though one can easily be tempted to do so especially when doing a piece about the legendary revolutionary. Salles did a stupendous job in humanizing Che in his Herculean attempt to separate the man and the myth. He depicted Che in all his travails, tribulations, and weaknesses; Salles also went on to show that while Che was not entirely naive of the rotten state of affairs of the continent, he did not make a full sense of the magnitude of the problem until he embarked on this fateful journey. Even then, instead of depicting the naked cruelty of the Yanqui economic imperialism in fruit plantations and copper mines that later served as a catalyst that launched Che's career as a revolutionary icon--which would have been awfully easy to do, by the way--Salles decided to tread on a more complex path of capturing the essence of human sufferings through poignant and profound individual interactions. This is especially hard to accomplish since lesser directors would find it more convenient to shine the light on ruthless corporate practices at the expense of exploring the deep and multi-faceted nature of human miseries.

To be more historically-exact, Che did not decide to become a full-fledged revolutionary until his second motorcycle journey when he continued his travel further north to Central America, where he witnessed first-hand the machinations of the US government via the CIA operatives in overthrowing democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 and when he first met with Fidel Castro in Mexico City. The experience of living through the us-versus-them era of the ideologically-rigid American Cold War and neo-liberal economic policies in Latin America certainly cemented Che's resolve in trying to fight the ills that were (and are still) plaguing his people. Viva la Revolucion! El Pueblo Unido Jama Sera Vencido!

By the way, the actor that played Che beautifully is Gael Garcia Bernal, a rising young Mexican actor. Some might remember him from the steamy and sensuous hit film, Y Tu Mama Tambien, about the coming-of-age exploits of two rambunctious Mexican teenagers and their travel companion, who is an enigmatic, sexually adventurous but somewhat troubled older woman. Also, it doesn't hurt that Gael Garcia is a leftist and is well-versed in socio-political affairs--this was evident from his interview with Tavis Smiley on PBS a few weeks ago.