entertain

Last night I saw Walter Salles’s retelling of the Che Guevara Odyssey, Part One, for the second time, in an attic high above Fell street. It was warm and I had just showered and there were subtitles on the TV screen.

A poodle snoozed nearby.

The film progressed, and I watched beautiful landscapes flutter around and two attractive young Spanish actors become increasingly dirty and tired and yet hungrier for adventure and so on. They met miners and out-of-work indigenous people and cowherds and doctors and attractive young women and a whole colony of lepers. They could quote Neruda and treat elderly old women’s diseases and bullshit their way into good favor. They relied largely on the kindness of strangers for room and board. They eventually gave in to the seemingly celestially-imposed tug of social responsibility. They came to understand the lives and sufferings of people all across their continent. They came to care deeply about the welfare of their countrymen and in the end gave birth once again to the phoenix-egg of Simón Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America.

And of course we know that Ernesto Guevara of Buenos Aires dashed into a telephone booth one day to change clothes and become Comandante Che of Havana, and later yet of Kinshasa and finally (with a bullet in the spine) in La Higuera.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be killed engaging in guerrilla war.

But that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

Comandanta Gata, la guerrerra con la mas ferocidad:

¡Viva la Revolucion!

¡VIVA CAT!

But as I said, unlikely.

Upon the opening of Salles’s epic, Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado seem no more than enthusiastic and wealthy young men. They are well-educated, with lucrative careers in both of their futures. They just want to have some reckless fun. Says the former, "Viajamos para viajar." The latter might well have added, "…y por el sexo."

And that’s all fine and well. There are two things that happen, though. They experience trials which they refuse to back off from, and they allow these trials to change them.

In a few weeks, I’ll be leaving for a somewhat shorter trip, along the other of these siamese-twin Americas. I’m taking a train (I haven’t got a car, nor a driver’s license) across southern Canada. Watching this film in such close proximity to my departure date makes me wish to reconsider all my travel plans. They make me want to swim across the Wazoo in the middle of the night and treat AIDS patients or something. But I can’t even quote Whitman.

Anyway, I have to remind myself that these guys had some things I didn’t. Medical training, for one. A reason for people to respect them on first meeting and help them out.

But you get the idea. One of the benefits of this film is it inspires the viewer to reconsider travel and be conscious of the possibilities thwacking us from every direction when we travel, and the things we should allow travel to do to us while we’re in it. To allow an effect.

I just hope that despite the looks of it, I’ll be able to extract some kind of profundity from my impending travels; I want to find something to care about on this trip; I want my travel to teach me something. But I suppose all I can do is let it happen.

The beauty of this film is in its messages. Its portrayal of Guevara and of the continent is sensitive and careful in a way I cannot describe. The imagery is rich, the scenes are well-chosen. Though, I’m a sucker for dance scenes. The characters are appealing, though not without faults. But we all saw that coming. Salles is an extraordinary artist in film. When Godard said cinema was over not too long ago, it was a slip of the ego; it’s not his fault; he’s French.

Ooh. Ouch.

I’ll close with the film’s tagline: "Let the world change you… and you can change the world." But all you’ve got to do is sit back and let the gears turn.