The Motorcycle Diaries

yup i watched it today. Awesome in every sense of the word. Quite a break from all that razzmatazz slick action and slapstick comedies that have been thrown at us all through the summer of 2007. There’s an old world charm about the movie. Its 2 central characters just put their lives on hold and take off on trans-continental ride through South America , to experience and feel the world around them. Its this theme of the movie that appeals to every person’s dream of just taking off on an adventure away from the city life to one of self discovery. The narrator of the movie Ernesto Guevara who also wrote the motorcycle diaries touches upon the various problems that plagued South America in 1951(year of the trip). He makes the trip with his 29 yr old friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist whom ernesto jokingly refers to as the Sexual Ambassador of Argentina due to his dream of banging a girl of every nation they cross en-route to the final destination.

Guevara and the 29-year-old Granado set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II (“The Mighty One, the Second”) with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper Colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River.

There are quite a few moving scenes in the movie , one of them being an encounter with a couple who had been stripped off their lands and were hoping to find work in a Mine Company (a hell hole in those days). Ernesto gives them the only money they had on them , the money given to him by his girlfriend to buy her something , the money which he had refused to part with against all odds even when he was laid down with high fever.

Many facets of ernesto’s character are laid before us in the movie. He’s shown to be extremely honest , idealistic and very humane guy who can empathize with the pain of the people left homeless , who lost their lands and those who dream of a united South America. I guess the journey forms the basis of formation of the revolutionary that Guevara became in his later years and whom the world famously came to know as ‘CHE'(yeah hes the bearded man on ur tshirt , and that photo has been named as the most famous photograph of 20th century).

It is a movie that you have to watch in the language it was made – Argentinian or whatever they call their language in Argentina coz that retains the authentic flavour of the movie. I think its a pity it wasnt released here , I am sure at least all the college guys could really have identified with the young idealistic but reckless and adventurous Guevara and his older eccentric womanizer friend Alberto.

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