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More Than Meets the Eye
Che's Bolivian Diary Reveals the Man Behind the Myth
by Paul D. Goetz
Free Press staff writer
Ernesto Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diary
written and directed by Richard Dindo
(in English and Spanish, with English subtitles)
April 11-14 at the Varsity Theater
Documentary filmmakers always struggle to finance films that have little chance of making back their costs. They often tackle socially conscious stories with a journalistic integrity that, let's face it, rarely translates into big box office. It seems the only way to attract audiences is to resort to sensationalism. When that happens, they become provocateurs. They become, well, Oliver Stone.
I'm sure it would come as no surprise to Richard Dindo, the director of this bravely restrained and long-overdue portrait of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in the year leading up to his execution, that Richard Fleischer's cartoonish travesty "Che!" (1969) probably made more money in its first day than "The Bolivian Diary" will ever make. Despite that early debacle, filmmakers of dubious integrity might still be tempted to amplify the myth of Guevara as larger-than-life hero - to cash in on the dramatic possibilities of a man who was a high-flown symbol of revolution for America's radical left of the 1960s. Two upcoming features about Guevara will be hard-pressed to equal the forthright clarity and understated power of Dindo's film.
Dindo opens with a succinct account of Guevara's life from 1961 to 1966 during which he was Fidel Castro's Minister of Industry, Cuba's envoy to various socialist outposts, and an open critic of American imperialism. He eventually came to distrust Soviet support and reproached the socialist camp for exploiting third world countries, which led to Soviet condemnation and estrangement from Castro. That he considered himself a citizen of the world rather than a self-serving nationalist is evident by his involvement in the Belgian Congo's struggle for liberation and his attempt to foment a revolution in Bolivia, a country with the poorest people and the highest frequency of military coups in South America.
Dispassionately narrated by Judith Burnett, with Robert Kramer providing the voice of Guevara, the balance of the film allows Guevara to speak plainly for himself through the reading of his own journals written deep in the Bolivian countryside between November of 1966 and October of 1967. The picture that emerges is of a small, ragtag group of guerrillas struggling from disaster to catastrophe. Low on food, arms, and medicine, they were continually on the run from a large, efficient, CIA-backed army. As we listen, Dindo takes his camera to the campsites and trails they used. He shows us numerous still photos and footage of the wooded locations where they hastily buried their comrades after skirmishes with the military. He interviews farmers, poor people in unchanged villages, and soldiers they encountered including the man who took Guevara into custody.
The quietly emerging portrait dashes the myth that Guevara was vainglorious or had a martyr complex. Instead, he appears humble, selfless, nearly Christ-like, but weak at times (asthmatic), and caught in a desperate situation. To make matters worse, the government's highly effective disinformation campaign made it impossible to organize any kind of peasant support. The cruelest irony is that in the end betrayal came from the very people he was trying to help. But bitterness does not appear to have been part of his makeup. In the film's final poignant minutes, in the still-primitive schoolroom where he was held prior to his execution, we listen to a villager, now in her 40's, who brought him food and listened to his dreams of bettering the lives of people like her. We see the footage of his cadaver with that beatific expression on his face and understand why the messages left on walls such as "You are one of those dead people who never die" endure and still resonate nearly 30 years later.
Lost Highway
written by David Lynch and Barry Gifford
directed by David Lynch
The Egyptian Theatre
While Enyedi seems hopeful that we can escape the demons among us, David Lynch's new film seems to suggest that the demons may just as easily reside within us, and that our lives are carefully orchestrated attempts to pave over a deep-seated fear of primal realities. On an unreal crust cracking up over a nightmare, Lynch has assembled Fred and Renee Madison, a jazz saxophonist (Bill Pullman) and his sultry, subdued wife (Patricia Arquette) living a life of lost passion and rising jealousy in an amorphous corner of Los Angeles.
Who's been videotaping the interior of their apartment while they sleep and leaving the tapes at their doorstep? Is it the other-worldly Mystery Man (Robert Blake looking like the undead) Fred meets at a party? Or, does this creature even exist? Others seem to notice him, too, but how does one confirm objectivity inside a nightmare? In a flash, this first act rolls up like a window shade inside Fred's mind and breaks its spring as he awakens to the grizzly possibility that he has killed his wife. Dark shades of the O.J. Simpson case pop up in our heads. The dread in this first act is unbearably palpable. The air itself seems alive with uneasiness. As usual, Lynch uses sound to stir aboriginal terrors. The sharp exhale of the troubled lovers during sex is like a reptilian hiss - a frighteningly primal sound.
In the film's second act, Fred is in prison. To the complete bafflement of us and prison officials, he disappears and is replaced by Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young amnesiac auto mechanic. Like Fred, Pete has an extremely dark secret he's unable or unwilling to face. The balance of the film concerns Pete's dealings with Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia), a volatile gangster, and his moll Alice (Arquette again, this time as a platinum blonde). Pete and Alice are soon seeing each other on the sly and planning to hit the road after they rob a porn kingpin, and you know more murder and mayhem are on the way.
The director's disregard for linear narrative and his embrace of genre derivations will undoubtedly irk most film critics, but how can one argue with the logic of a nightmare? It's like passing judgment on the deformations of nature. And Lynch is deliberately cloaking his nightmare of shape-shifting evil in movie and pop-culture cliches to mimic our protective psychic insulation. He's playing with the suspense genre- throwing the comfort of its formulas back in our faces. But always there's the troubling suggestion of an omnipotent nightmare jangling underneath.
"Lost Highway's" closest cousin in Lynch's family of films is "Twin Peaks." Once again, there is a murder mystery in which twins play a significant role; moreover, the murderer, unwilling or unable to face the evil within, projects that evil into the Other-thus, the Leland/Bob incarnation in "Twin Peaks" and the Fred or Pete/Mystery Man in "Lost Highway." Does the Other exist, or is the murderer entirely responsible? Don't ask Lynch. Like a feverish paranormal scientist mucking about in the spectral slime, he's too busy enjoying the hunt to get pedantic about it.
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Contents on this page were published in the March/April, 1997 edition of the Washington Free
Press.
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