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Last night I relaxed with this 2004 movie, which the box said had won a foreign language Oscar, so I figured it must have some real quality.  It tells the story of the young Che Guevara’s motorcycle and walking tour of South America.  Motorcycles, Memoir, history - it sounded like my thing.

Even so, I was unprepared for just how good it would be.

The movie is based on Guevara’s own diaries, and on the memoir written by his companion, Alberto Granado, as the two of them travel vast mileages across South America to visit and work at a leper colony.  Some of the time they’re on a 1938 500cc Norton that ‘pisses oil’, until they wreck it and then continue, unlikely as it may sound, on foot.

Many of the things I liked about this movie can be summed up, emblematically, in the way the motorcycle is treated.  I shudder to think what Hollywood would have done with such material. One of the things I always disliked about ‘Easy Rider’ was that the gleaming machines felt like stageprops.  The physicality of moving along a road was never real to me in that movie.  Fortunately in the case of ‘Diaries’ director Walter Salles decided to treat the bike as a real object, one that occasionally goes moderately fast, mostly lumbers along, and frequently wobbles or falls over.  The riders (for they are doubled up on one machine) tumble, dust themselves off, are genuinely annoyed, and wobble off down the atrocious roads again with extra bruises. The sense of their quixotic mission is never lost, and the feeling of the vastness of the Southern Americas never leaves us.  And when the bike is finally too bent and worn out for further use they decide to walk - which surely speaks of the fire to explore that simply will not be pushed aside.

In the middle of it all came the unmistakable signs of the six archetypes, full strength.

Guevara leaves home as an Orpan, but it isn’t until the motorcycle lets them down that he becomes a real Pilgrim.  Suddenly it’s not just a lark anymore. And when he and Granado finally arrive at the leper colony their openness and lack of pretence means they refuse to wear the regulation rubber gloves when treating the patients.  They greet them as real people, shake hands, organize soccer games (in which they play, and joyously hurling obscene insults at each other, while the nuns smile) and insist on just being themselves.  The scene in which Guevara swims the river to say his farewells to the colony is miraculously under-stated.  If ever we had an image of a man who was prepared to put his life on the line for those he loves, just because he loves them, this would be it.  The Warrior-Lover stands before us, exhausted, dripping wet, in this beauteous piece of poetry.

When the friends part, Granado to take up a good job in Caracas and Guevara to continue his travels, we see the parting of the ways that is inevitable for the Warrior-Lover who elects to stay in that space.  And Guevara did. We don’t see it in the movie but we are told Guevara went on to make his dream larger as a revolutionary - covering not just healthcare but human rights throughout South America, until a CIA sponsored plot had him assassinated.

Whatever we think of Guevara’s politics his heart was assuredly in the right place.  He made at least part of his dream come true, working with Castro, as well as leading social reforms in Bolivia as true example of the Monarch.  And his example is profoundly inspiring - he touches the Magician stage.

As Memoir the story works brilliantly: it describes a moment of profound change that led on to a different life.  As a movie it succeeds because it refuses to slip into glamor or melodrama. And in it are those same six stages, if we care to see them.