Cannes stands to cheer story of Che's road to revolution By Hugh Davies (Filed: 20/05/2004) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
As the 20th century's most romanticised revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, dead since 1967, is being immortalised in a rash of new films led by a British-backed epic based on his writings. At two screenings in Cannes yesterday, audiences reacted with standing ovations. Critics hailed what Variety called a beautifully wrought account of how 52 years ago, Guevara travelled on a 1939 Norton 500 from Buenos Aires through Chile, Machu Picchu in Peru and Venezuela, on an eye-opening road trip. The Motorcycle Diaries shows how the journey set the tone for his devotion to communism. The grisly details of what happened to him after the 1959 Cuban revolution - his role in nearly 2,000 executions, his falling out with Fidel Castro, and his miserable death in Bolivia where he had tried to trigger another uprising - are left to other film-makers. Instead, the Brazilian director Walter Salles, acclaimed for Behind The Sun and Central Station, has concentrated on Guevara's eight months in the company of a fellow Argentinian, Alberto Granado, recreating his dawning social conscience. At the time, Guevara, an inward-looking asthmatic, was an upper-class medical student with no particular interest in politics. The diaries, given to Salles in Havana by Guevara's widow, Aleida, show how his travelling companion stirred his interest in Stalin and the Russian revolution. Granado, a tiny, impish man, now 81 and living in Havana, worked closely with Salles to recreate the journey, travelling with the director and his actors. He said in Cannes: "I was 29 and he was 24. There was a sort of progressive transformation. We were young, and we saw what the reactionaries were doing to the world." Crucial to the making of the film, which took five years, was the £6.6 million raised by Film Four and the help of Robert Redford, the executive producer. Six years ago, Redford visited Cuba, where Guevara remains lionised in statues, on murals, and at stores which sell photographs of him marlin fishing with Castro and Ernest Hemingway. Redford returned to Havana four months ago to show The Motorcycle Diaries to Guevara's family. Che's daughter, Celia, said: "If you read the books Daddy wrote, you will see that the film is very faithful to the original." A former revolutionary commander, Ramiro Valdes, was also at the screening, and later Castro turned up at the Hotel Nacional to discuss the film with Redford. Whether he saw the picture is not known. Castro's uneasy relationship with the more charismatic, and harder-working Guevara has never been fully explained. It is thought that when he went to Bolivia, the leader was glad to see the back of him. Interest in the diary film is intense, especially as Guevara is played by Gael Garcia Bernal, 25, the dark-eyed Mexican actor who came to prominence in another road film, Y tu mama tambien. Omar Sharif played Che in 1969, and Antonio Banderos took the role in Evita, eight years ago. In July, Terrence Malik, who made Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, starts shooting the $40 million Che, which will follow Guevera's final years.