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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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The Film File
Once you have decided to make a film about Che Guevara, you face a forbidding choice. His life was a feast, so on which particular course should you concentrate? The taking of Cuba? The fiasco in the Congo? Bolivia and death? In "The Motorcycle Diaries," based on a memoir by Che himself, the Brazilian director Walter Salles has gone for the appetizer: an eight-month, eight-thousand-mile journey undertaken by Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his buddy Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) through South America in 1952. This was hardly a leisure pursuit, but the movie's curious air of suspended animation leaves you asking whether it could start a cinematic trend, in which the fun-hunting days of history's most transforming radicals will be replayed for our delight. Look out for "Trotsky: The Frat-House Years," plus a tender glimpse at that little-known summer of A.D. 15, when Jesus hardly left the beach.
So what we get is a neophyte, a medical student named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: pre-beard, pre-beret, dressed in a plain white shirt instead of combat fatigues, and still waiting for that "Che" to land at the front of his name. It began life, if the film is to be believed, not as a nickname but as a noise--a chewy, specifically Argentine word (it means "hey, you"), mocked by a couple of girls in a cafe. It is the second most important sound in the film, the first being...
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