"The Motorcycle Diaries" (Language - Spanish) (2004) - Movie Review

What future shaped and designed one of the protagonist in “The Motorcycle Diaries” is insignificant because the travel that sparked the path to the eventuality provides a nostalgic milestone to its audience. The youth that withers away like the burning threads to the explosion and the sparkles of fires last till they can to lead the curiosity to the eventuality of this journey. The journey these two friends take through the South America. Ernesto Guevera (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) are two men hoping to find something out of this long and tiring trip. The cliche of finding themselves is moot point but this unspoken and calm assured friendship between them makes “The Motorcycle Diaries” into a road movie of any two young men waiting for the waves of responsibility to hit them.

Ernesto has few months to complete his studies to become doctor and his biochemist friend Granado wants to have the tour of a life time. Both begin this journey on a vehicle which does not know balance and stability. They slide and lacerate their trousers and shirts and skins along the way. Sliding close to dirt and swallowing it in the sweet air of the country they cruise, these two men does not aspire for crazy stunts or find adventure stories. They are out there for a trip they do not know what to expect and take the days as they come by.

They run through the history’s left pieces. The nature in the background sometimes goes unnoticed with the characters wondering on the empty outlook. They meet people on their way and see the demarcation of the poor and segregation of the financially backwards. Since we know what happened to Ernesto, the stress on those emotions appear a little extra concentrated. But that is not director Walter Salles wants his audience to see the film as. It is about any regular people who decide to do a road trip. Fun, frolic and debauchery are expected and happens.

As they begin to the endless roads, Ernesto and Granado do not speak about their great expectations. There is the narration of Ernesto as letters to his mom. They travel the branches and roots of the Latin America which opens up the world they were shunned and sheltered away from. Being in the early twenties and doubtful of the function this world, these are typical humans in the edge of a transformation.

Why do we travel? To take a break, to meet new people, to forget the clockwork one endures through but the real travel is as cliche it may sound is the journey within each. To pertain to the core of a human being to reinvent, rethink and be in the space to be themselves, purely for themselves. In this a mind clears, shifts or goes into another plain of thought. When the world as they have been living calls back, some extend those thoughts to action in great aspect or some bury into the memories to be nostalgic of the once lived golden days. The future is open and time waits. Thus are these two men with dreams and their idealism met with doubts and injustice.

Going with the right people to the right places is paramount for a fulfilling trip. In this Ernesto and Granado appear to be of different nature. Ernesto is a shy young man while Granado at the doorsteps of big three “O” knows his way around women. They have medicine in common and a varying degree of expression towards the people suffering from poverty, segregation and difference of philosophy.

“The Motorcycle Diaries” is a film about many things but it is prominent about the friendship between these two people. With a destiny to reach a point and nothing else, they do not talk much about their opinions on the system but understand the encounters shaping them. And when the time comes to depart, each knows what the other is going forward in their future endeavours. In the end, they show the real Granado looking at the flight taking off much similar to the one he bid goodbye to his friend when the trip got over several decades back. In his eyes, more than the nostalgia and a lost friend is the sigh of not able to see that friend in the times when innocence was still fresh in both of them.