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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.
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