’’This is not the tale of impressive deeds. Is a piece of two lives taken in a moment when they were cruising together along a given path with identity of aspirations and a conjunction of dreams’’
- Ernesto Guevara da la Serna, 1952
An eight thousand mile expedition across South America would be a womb to the most charismatic communist of the twentieth century. Who could tell?
January, 1952. Set out on an epic odyssey on a battered and leaked ’39 Norton 500, what they called ’’an improvizasión’’, were a biochemist, Alberto Granado and a leprosy specialist, Ernesto Guevara da la Serna aka ’’Che Guevara’’. Commencing from Buenos Aires, Argentina their journey would crown at the northernmost point of South America, The Peninsula of Guajira, Venunzuela.
What starts off as an adventurous road-trip into the picturesque murals of South America, parenthetically develops into a voyage of self-discovery for Che (Gael Garcia Bernal). Strapped for cash and travelling through the most introverted parts of South America, they proximately interact and experience social bigotries under which the natives, farmers and the poor hands barely endure in. First of such encounters befalls in a village of Chile where, Che is asked to attend on a dying woman. His inner dispositions echo in a letter to his mother,
’’I knew I wouldn’t be able to help that poor woman that up to a month ago had been serving tables, panting like me, trying to live with dignity. In those dying eyes, there was a humble request for excuses and a desperate plea of consolation that gets lost in the emptiness, just as her body will get lost very soon in the magnitude of the mystery that surrounds us.’’.
Che’s metamorphosis from a medical student to an ultra-radical cognoscenti comes about in the course of his journey. A vision of ’’United America’’ which is separated in false and uncertain nationalities is seeded. His socio-economic weltanschauung was highly influenced by José Carlos Mariátegui’s ’’7 Essays of Interpretation of the Peruvian Reality’’ presented by Dr Hugo Pesce (who they meet in Lima) and a leprosy centre at San Pablo. Che explicitly shares his thoughts on United America in his last speech in San Pablo and swims across the amazon, which is an allegorical barrier between the sick (north island) and the healthy (south island).
The protagonist of the film is South America itself. Walter Salles brilliantly captures the erudite semblance of Che’s mind and at the same time he proficiently handles the lighter moments of Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna). On a particular instance, when Che and Alberto are up in the Andes in the kingdom of Incas, Alberto, in jest, remarks that he should marry an Inca descendant and reactivate Tupac Amaru’s indo-american revolution, to which Che sternly retorts ’’A revolution without gunshots?’’ The confab button downs Che’s conflicting mind and is adeptly handled by Salles.
At the culmination of their journey, Che concludes in his diary,
’’Was our vision too narrow, too partial, too rushed? Were our conclusions too rigid? Maybe.. ’’
’’But that aimless roaming through our enormous America has changed me more that I thought. I.. am not myself anymore. Atleast, I am not the same inside.’’
Commander Che Guevara’s last words before being assassinated by the Regulation Army of Bolivia and the CIA were, ’’Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man’’.
Che Guevara Lives....