a film by Walter Salles
Based on the journals of both Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara, the man who would later become 'Che', the film follows a journey of self-discovery, tracing the origins of a revolutionary heart. With a highly romantic sense of adventure, the two friends leave their familiar surroundings in Buenos Aires on La Poderosa, 'The Mighty One', a rickety 1939 Norton 500. Although the bike breaks down during the course of their eight month journey, they press onward, hitching rides along the way. As they start to see a different Latin America in the people they meet on the road, the diverse geography they encounter begins to reflect their own shifting perspectives. By the end of their journey the two are questioning the value of progress as defined by economic systems that leave so many people beyond their reach – and their experiences awaken within them the men they will later become.
In December 1951, 23-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, 'Fuser' to his friends, one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his studies to accompany his 29-year-old biochemist friend Alberto Granado, 'Mial', on a projected four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America, starting from their home in Buenos Aires. Their quest is to see things they've only read about in books about the continent on which they live. Their planned route is ambitious, taking them first south into Patagonia, then north across the Andes, along the coast of Chile, through the Atacama Desert and into the Peruvian Amazon in order to reach Venezuela in time for Granado's 30th birthday. However, due to La Poderosa's breakdown, they are forced to travel at a much slower pace, taking a further three months to arrive in Caracas, and covering a total distance of 13,240 km.
During their expedition, Guevara and Granado encounter the poverty of the indigenous people, and begin to gain a better sense of the disparity between the "haves" (to which they belong) and the "have-nots" (who make up the majority of those they encounter). In Chile they meet a penniless and persecuted couple forced onto the road because of their communist beliefs. Guevara and Granado ashamedly admit that they are not out looking for work as well. They then accompany the couple to the Chuquicamata copper mine, where Guevara angrily witnesses the treatment of the workers. Later, there is also an instance of recognition when Guevara, on a luxurious river ship, looks down at the poor dark-skinned indians on the small wooden boat hitched behind.
However, it is a visit to the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru that solidifies something in Guevara. His musings are then sombrely refocused to how an indigenous civilisation capable of building such beauty could be destroyed by the creators of the now decaying and polluted urban sprawl of nearby Lima. His reflections are interrupted by Granado, who shares with him a dream to peacefully revolutionise and transform modern South America, to which Guevara quickly retorts: "A revolution without guns? It will never work."
Later, in Peru, they volunteer for three weeks at the San Pablo leper colony. There, Guevara observes both literally and metaphorically the division of society between the toiling masses and the ruling class, as the staff live on the north side of the river, separated from the deprived lepers living to the south. To demonstrate his solidarity, Guevara refuses to wear rubber gloves during his visit choosing instead to shake bare hands with the startled leper inmates.
On their last evening at San Pablo, spent celebrating with the staff, Guevara confirms his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, while making a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends both the arbitrary boundaries of nation and race. His encounters with social injustice transform the way Guevara sees the world, and by implication motivate his later political activities as a Marxist revolutionary. He makes his symbolic 'final journey' that night when despite his asthma, he chooses to swim across the river separating the two societies of the leper colony, to spend the night in a leper shack, instead of in the cabins of the doctors. This journey implicitly symbolises Guevara's rejection of wealth and aristocracy into which he was born, and the path he would take later in his life as a guerrilla, fighting for what he believed was the dignity every human being deserves.
A beautiful and tender insight into the early life of Che Guevara, one of the most memorable and iconic figures of the 20th century. The film closes with an appearance by the real 82-year-old Alberto Granado, along with pictures from the actual journey and a brief mention of Che Guevara's eventual 1967 CIA-assisted execution in the Bolivian jungle.
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