The motorcycle diaries
I actually really wonder why they called themselves “Fuser” and “Mial” all the time (and oh by the way, “Mial” as well as “Miel” actually sound nice – maybe I’ll just it as a nickname somewhere).
It’s been so long that I have watched the film so that I don’t even remember which day it was anymore. I only remember that it was a rather stressful day, but I didn’t regret having watched the film at all. Indeed, one might consider the film a little bit boring and in some ways, it’s true that the storyline itself does not lead to anywhere, but somehow, that film stayed memorable for me for three reasons.
The first one obviously is Gael Garcia Bernal. I really plan to watch every single film he has starred in (as well as Jake Gyllenhaal and Edward Norton, by the way), especially since all the roles he had so far were so different and interesting. Somehow his innocent and honest looks make him a great Che Guevara (or rather: a great Che how the film-makers wanted him to be) – maybe he’s a little bit like Hugh Grant, another shy and honest looking guy who in reality is a bit of a player, ehehe.
The second reason is the Che Guevara background. As you can probably imagine, I have dug out Wikipedia articles about Che Guevara and to be honest, I feel rather insatisfied with them. Just like everybody has a wrong perception of Mao or the Dalai Lama and buddhism, everybody seems to either worship or hate Che Guevara for things he probably didn’t even do. This is rather fascinating, especially since usually nobody seems to care about Cuba, even less today.
The third is actually the main reason why this film kind of has stayed in my mind for the whole time until I finally wrote this down: Seeing the motorbike trip itself and the beautiful landscape has driven an urge in me to do the same, to travel through South America. It’s rather surprising because I never really cared about South America, I was much more interested in Australia for example, or Northern Europe or South East Asia. But of course South America also has both marvelous landscapes and old civilizations, and that makes it interesting for me. Even more than with a car, I want to travel around on a motorbike and ‘find’ something I might have overlooked in life. (Maybe this is the influence of Kino no Tabi? Hehe.) So… who would I want to go with, I wonder? XD