The Motorcycle Diaries

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Film Description

In 1952, two young Argentinian men, the medical student Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and friend Alberto Granada set out on a road trip to discover the real Latin America. Guevara's own journals form the basis of Salles's film of this journey of self-discovery as the two experience the region's rich and varied life and landscape. Gorgeously filmed, it avoids overt politics while leaning towards Guevara's later political life.

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Review by David Gillam on 16th December 2004

A fascinating glimpse into the early life of the legendary revolutionary that follows the idealistic young Che on a motorbike trip around South America from Patagonia into Chile, across the Andes, and into the Peruvian Amazon to work at a leper colony. Born into a protective Buenos Aires family, the asthmatic, young Guevara is shy, sincere and painfully honest. His inability to dance, drink or pick up women is in marked contrast to his mate and mentor, the fun-loving Alberto who provides a much-needed counterweight to Che’s intense almost puritanical seriousness. At times, astride their ancient Norton, the ill-named ‘The Mighty One’, they are more like Laurel & Hardy than would-be revolutionaries. While Alberto would rather spin a fantastical story to get a bed for the night or a free meal, Che cannot tell a lie - whatever the cost to their plans.

With a great sense of time and place, Salles affectingly portrays Che’s physical and spiritual journey through stunning landscapes, mischievous adventures and random encounters that awaken his sympathies with the poor and the dispossessed. Many of the images are breathtaking and bring to mind the magical opening of Herzog’s classic Aguirre Wrath of God. But of course, all road movies lead inwards. The changing vistas, the alternating weather, are merely a front for the real journey that is interior. Here, the landscapes exert a tangible emotion. Whether it is crossing the Andes in the snow, or hiking through the dusty wastes of the Atacama desert where they fall in with a young couple searching desperately for the work. The look the young couple give Che when he admits that they are traveling ‘simply to travel’ makes for one of the most telling scenes in the film.

But in the end, beautiful as they are, it is not the landscapes that are most important here but the people who live in them. In this haphazard journey Che witnesses the plight of the poor for the first time. With the inevitable delays and the disruption to routine that any such journey brings, he has time to reflect, write in his diary, and change from a privileged young doctor to a passionate rebel. The enduring strength of Salles’ fine film is the sense it gives you of getting inside Che’s head, the times of reflection as well as action, that give us an insight into this process of transformation. So that the moment when he chooses to be among the disadvantaged of the leper colony rather than merely, as we are, a witness to their suffering, seems natural, indeed inevitable. This is a love-letter to a continent and its people, from one of their own, which subtly reveals the small, emotionally defining shifts in Che’s views that would change the world.

Review by Howard Schumann on 11th November 2004

A fascinating glimpse into the early life of the legendary revolutionary that follows the idealistic young Che on a motorbike trip around South America from Patagonia into Chile, across the Andes, and into the Peruvian Amazon to work at a leper colony. Born into a protective Buenos Aires family, the asthmatic, young Guevara is shy, sincere and painfully honest. His inability to dance, drink or pick up women is in marked contrast to his mate and mentor, the fun-loving Alberto who provides a much-needed counterweight to Che’s intense almost puritanical seriousness. At times, astride their ancient Norton, the ill-named ‘The Mighty One’, they are more like Laurel & Hardy than would-be revolutionaries. While Alberto would rather spin a fantastical story to get a bed for the night or a free meal, Che cannot tell a lie - whatever the cost to their plans.

With a great sense of time and place, Salles affectingly portrays Che’s physical and spiritual journey through stunning landscapes, mischievous adventures and random encounters that awaken his sympathies with the poor and the dispossessed. Many of the images are breathtaking and bring to mind the magical opening of Herzog’s classic Aguirre Wrath of God. But of course, all road movies lead inwards. The changing vistas, the alternating weather, are merely a front for the real journey that is interior. Here, the landscapes exert a tangible emotion. Whether it is crossing the Andes in the snow, or hiking through the dusty wastes of the Atacama desert where they fall in with a young couple searching desperately for the work. The look the young couple give Che when he admits that they are traveling ‘simply to travel’ makes for one of the most telling scenes in the film.

But in the end, beautiful as they are, it is not the landscapes that are most important here but the people who live in them. In this haphazard journey Che witnesses the plight of the poor for the first time. With the inevitable delays and the disruption to routine that any such journey brings, he has time to reflect, write in his diary, and change from a privileged young doctor to a passionate rebel. The enduring strength of Salles’ fine film is the sense it gives you of getting inside Che’s head, the times of reflection as well as action, that give us an insight into this process of transformation. So that the moment when he chooses to be among the disadvantaged of the leper colony rather than merely, as we are, a witness to their suffering, seems natural, indeed inevitable. This is a love-letter to a continent and its people, from one of their own, which subtly reveals the small, emotionally defining shifts in Che’s views that would change the world.

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This film is part of the following Film Collections

Road Movies

Including: Badlands, Baise-Moi, Bonnie And Clyde, Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Central Station, Convoy, Dead End (2003), Detour (1945), Dogma, Drôle de Félix.

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