Director: Walter Salles

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: A–

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was an Argentine doctor. Under the name Che Guevara, he became a comandante, or major, in the Cuban revolution, and later led communist guerrilla units in the Congo and Bolivia.

Casting

Staying well behind

Medical student Ernesto Guevara and his biochemist friend Alberto Granado set out on their motorcycle from Buenos Aires, heading for North America. According to press reports, Rodrigo de la Serna, playing Alberto, is a second cousin to the real Che Guevara. DNA isn't everything, though: the unrelated Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, playing Ernesto, much more closely resembles Guevara in 1952. Indeed, when the real Ernesto was well groomed, it was often said that he looked like a movie star. But that didn't happen too often, for he had a lifelong aversion to grooming. He once wore a pair of underpants for two months, and then gleefully won a bet that they would stand up by themselves. Thankfully, that isn't in the film.

Romance

Puppy love

The first stop on the men's trip is Miramar, south of Buenos Aires, where they visit Ernesto's girlfriend Chichina. He gives her a puppy, named (in English) Come-back, to indicate that he intends to, well, come back. In the film, she gives him $15 to buy her a bathing suit when he reaches the United States. In real life, according to one of Che's biographers, the money was for a scarf. Other than that, this is accurate.

Media

Nuts and bolts

The bike breaks down near a small Chilean town. Alberto and Ernesto are broke – but they have an idea. They give an interview to the town paper, claiming to be touring leprosy experts, and then use the piece to impress the locals into giving them free stuff. This is also true. The mechanic who fixes their bike invites them to a dance. By now, Chichina has dumped Ernesto, and he is nursing a broken heart. Which means he's trying to cop off with the mechanic's wife.

Scandal

Highway Chile

The film subtly cleans Ernesto's conduct up in comparison with his own description of the evening. It depicts the mechanic's wife, as the real Guevara wrote, acting "pretty randy", but glosses over the fact that Ernesto too was "full of Chilean wine". When she refused him, "I was in no state to listen to reason and we had a bit of a barney in the middle of the dance floor," he admitted. As in in the movie, Ernesto and Alberto were chased out of the dance hall by a mob of angry Chileans. But the film uses dramatic licence when it has them bust out their bike from the mechanic's garage and speed off in the nick of time. In reality, they stayed another night, had lunch with a family next door to the garage, and left without incident in the afternoon.

Politics

A rare encounter with water

In the mining settlement near Chuquicamata, Alberto and Ernesto meet an impoverished couple who fear persecution on the grounds that they are communists – which, at the time, Ernesto was not. From 1948 until 1958, the Chilean Communist party was banned and its adherents prosecuted under the Law for the Defence of Democracy. The poet Pablo Neruda was among those who fled the country. The scene in the movie sticks closely to Guevara's account. There's one striking difference. In the film, we are later told that Ernesto gave Chichina's $15 to the couple. In real life, both Ernesto and the $15 eventually made it to Miami – and, though Ernesto never saw Chichina again, he did apparently send her that scarf.

Verdict

High ideals

If the young Ernesto Guevara needed a clean-up, it was in the sense of an actual wash. As for his faults, he himself was more frank about them than this movie is. That aside, The Motorcycle Diaries gets a lot right. It's an entertaining and accurate portrayal of the formative youth of a revolutionary icon.



• Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean, is published by Simon & Schuster this week.