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"The Motorcycle Diaries" - movie review


“The plan: to travel 8000 kms in 4 months”. And so they travel through the beautiful landscapes and picturesque horizons that melt your heart away. The serene lush green countryside and the milky-white Mountains against the backdrop of blue sky and rugged muddy road that romantically dissolves into the horizon, with the background score that lifts you up from the comforts of your room and throws you asunder into the mountainous terrains and snowy valleys, the movie has already made me go on an exploration myself, before it is too late.

“Each moment splits into two” protagonist writes to his mother on his journey, “melancholy for what was left behind, all the enthusiasm at entering new lands” chile’s frost covered roads with trees and animals eaten up by snow in entirety, nothing but the bike and two adventurers on it are seen for miles and miles along the road. They trip and fall off the bike for the third time since the day adventure began. The roads are desolate and one wonders why? Why would anyone chose to spend time away from an entrancing beauty that encircles your heart in tight embrace and enthrals you with its cold shivers. Snow is all you can see, two men on a bike is all there is to see. The movie leaves a lasting impression on even the casual viewer.

There are cows on the road, but the bike is too old, rusty, patchy and the brakes won’t work. And change occurs; fluid and entrusting. It is on the road to peru that the two men realise the change, adventure fizzles away and the human apathy creases their mind that was hitherto unexposed to such indifference or downright intolerance. “How is it possible that I feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?” the protagonist wonders at the sight of marvellous civilization’s (Incas) remnants, rock sculptures and caves that were once inhabited and now deserted. As if they were running away from a portentous force on their backs, they were all gone, only rocks and caves were left now.

The doctors work with dignity and pride in treating the old, battered and bitten peoples of the place. The young girl’s arm that they treat by cutting it out, the melancholic old man’s feet they treat and nurse all the time, by the end of it, they are changed men. They leave the place after celebrating 24th birthday of the younger doctor with his swimming across the river that divided rich from poor, sick from healthy; they leave on a raft (mambo tango-named after the younger’s mistimed tango dance for a mambo tune)with the morning fog slowly sweeping over and blurring the faces of adorable men and women they have met there.

Muddy roads, shaky camera work, two men on an old greasy bike that leaks and freaks on turns- all of this against the beautiful backdrop of evening sky, travelling lonely on high plains. Sky is blue and the road dry, bike stuttering and the asthma patient in the back who refuses to get treated with his girl friend’s money that he carries with him plaintively.

“I am not the same anymore, at least not the same inside”. The protagonist concludes.

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