I went to the sumptuous, but hot Gate cinema this evening to see "The Motorcycle Diaries". I was disappointed to find out that this wasn't an account of the day to day experiences of some dangerous two wheeled forms of transport, but instead an account of a road trip undertaken by a youthful Che Guevara and his friend. Despite my initial disillusionment I did enjoy the film very much.
To my shame I don't know too much about Ernesto Guevara's life or exploits, beyond him being on Wolfie Smith's T-shirt, but the film made me keen to learn. It's really about youthful integrity and a burgeoning social conscience, tempered by some understandable interest in sexual exploits, though it's all beautifully and sensitively put together. It's nothing like "Porky's". Although the friends do rail against the injustices of life in fifties South America in the same way that the Porky's gang rebel against the strictures of the night-club they covet entry to.
The previous paragraph demonstrates why I must never be allowed to be a film critic.
Inevitably it made me think of the travels of my youth and principally about the couple of months that me and Geoff Quigley interrailed and hitch-hiked around Europe in 1986. Neither of us went on to help lepers or forment a communist revolution (oh wait, Geoff did forment one communist revolution in Bristol, but it came to nothing), but it was a similarly exciting tmie of freedom and self-imposed hardship. We were such young idiots; how it must have scared our parents to let us loose on the wide world. But we have to take risks in order to learn anything about ourselves or others. I have nothing but fond memories of it, despite the food poisoning and the constant diet of mashed potatoes and cheese.
How we romantacise the past. I am sure I hated every minute of it at the time.
It's a terrific film, go and see it. Unless you are still young, in which case go out in the world and have your own fun and let us oldies wallow in the falsehood of nostalgia.
