A Failure of Nerve

The Edukators (Hans Weingartner, Germany/Austria)
and The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles, Argentina/Peru/Chile/Bolivia/USA)

By Richard Porton

In recent years, that chronically amorphous entity known as “political cinema” has become synonymous, at least in North America, with high-minded (or, in the case of Michael Moore, low-minded) documentaries. Many such films are laudable, but the recent re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965) recalls that a radical narrative political cinema, with no concessions to either liberal pabulum or crude agit-prop, was once possible. The tough-mindedness of Pontecorvo’s masterpiece—a nuanced anti-colonialist film that nevertheless avoids sentimentalizing Algerian terrorism—is conspicuously absent in present-day narrative political cinema. In an era where utopian hopes have been discarded, allegory seems to have much more potency than social realism. For that reason, it’s arguable that recent fiction films not acknowledged by most critics as particularly political at all—e.g., The Saddest Music in the World—are much more politically trenchant than, say, Costa-Gavras’ Amen (2002).

Two vapid—but crowd-pleasing—Cannes Competition selections unwittingly demonstrate how the intellectual and aesthetic impoverishment of much contemporary political cinema can be traced to a fatal failure of nerve. Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators and Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries are distinctly different in tone and style. In the guise of a gentle lampoon of the follies of young German radicals, Weingartner falls back on complacent clichés that dismiss any sort of political commitment. Salles’ sober road movie pays humourless homage to Ernesto “Che” Guevara with a painstaking, and painfully dull, chronicle of Che and his friend Alberto Granado’s youthful trek across Latin America. Yet both films pander to the prejudices of middle-class, nominally liberal audiences. Just as many leftists prefer the novels of Céline (an unrepentant fascist) to the bland pieties spouted by so-called “liberals,” I’d rather be provoked by an intelligent right-wing cineaste instead of being bored by “feelgood” liberal cinema.

Whatever its target audience, The Edukators is, in the final analysis, a de facto paean to what Marcuse used to call “the affirmative culture” and the rest of us term the status quo. As often happens, the film’s conformism is disguised as an affectionate tribute to rebellious youth. The Educkators’ dramatis personae—Jan (Daniel Bruhl), Peter (Stipe Erceg), and Peter’s lissome girlfriend, Jule (Julia Jentsch)—seem remarkably well behaved for young incendiaries. They listen to soothing soft rock and mutter earnest regrets about how bourgeois Germans do little but watch television. Having obviously imbibed No Logo, they are concerned consumers who express nostalgia for the supposedly halcyon days of the 60s. While Jule worries about her debt to a wealthy businessman whose Mercedes she absentmindedly totaled, Jan and Peter “act” on their anti-consumerist passions by breaking into the homes of rich burghers and re-arranging their possessions.

Jan and Peter’s faux-burglaries initially come off as post-Situationist pranks, but there is a naïve, and, above all, moralistic quality to their nocturnal romps distinguishing them from truly radical interventions. Informing the rich that their “days are numbered” does little to pinpoint the dissemination of power in German society and, since Jan and Peter are middle-class kids, their little feats of derring-do are as much self-indictments as audacious assaults on bourgeois propriety. The self-absorbed quality of these break-ins becomes clearer when Jule and Jan begin a furtive romance and the film enters Jules et Jim territory. A raid on the home of Herr Hardenberg, the owner of the Mercedes Jule demolished, is conducted without Peter’s knowledge and goes awry when the millionaire shows up and the trio stage an impromptu kidnapping.

The Edukators’ overweening complacency soon becomes apparent. Hardenberg, the ostensibly villainous millionaire, reveals his true colours as an avuncular ex-radical who once broke bread with Rudi Dutschke. Fondly counselling his young captors and dispensing stale wisdom on the order of “under 30 and not liberal, no heart; over 30 and still liberal, no brain”—a line that received applause from the Cannes crowd—he is a veritable one-man Big Chill. The implicit message is that youthful radicalism, in Germany or elsewhere, is a post-adolescent, essentially innocuous rite of passage.

Although Weingartner attempts to infuse these shenanigans with comic brio, his humour is as flat as the film’s dreary DV cinematography. Like last year’s middlebrow art house hit, Goodbye, Lenin!, The Edukators is satire at its most toothless. Whatever one thinks of the exploits of 60s activists, the complacent Hardenburg is a particularly unedifying caricature of that era and its passions. A more complex, and troubling, trajectory can be discerned in the career of Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister. Fischer’s rise to power, as both student Marxist and mainstream Green politician, is suffused with equal amounts of idealism, opportunism, tentative courage, and bad faith. The Fischer who glossed over his youthful days as a street fighter and stonewalled when confronted with accusations of his links with members of the Baader-Meinhof “gang” is also the man who stood up to Donald Rumsfeld during preparations for the Iraq invasion. He is, if nothing else, rife with all of the contradictions that often provide fodder for stimulating drama, but The Edukators—a lame farce determined to comfort the comfortable—has little patience for genuine historical ironies.

If The Edukators is disconcertingly snarky, the Robert Redford-produced The Motorcycle Diaries proves cloyingly earnest. No radical icon of the 20th century is as much in need of demystification as Che Guevara. Yet going beyond the mainstream left’s uncritical veneration (and the right’s demonization) of Guevara is a surprisingly daunting task. Even Leandro Katz’s admirable documentary dissecting the famous final photograph of the martyred Guevara, The Day You’ll Love Me (1997), ultimately reinforces the Che myth. The last shot of Kurosawa’s Bright Future (2002), reveals, however inadvertently, the quasi-theological nature of the Che cult: glassy-eyed teenagers in “Che” T-shirts saunter down the street, emblems of anomie who surely haven’t read a word written by their idol.

Far more lyrical and incisive than the turgid Marxist-Leninist prose churned out by Guevara after becoming a professional revolutionary, the travel diaries, which honestly reflect the nascent political consciousness of a young Argentine medical student, could certainly have been the basis for a compelling film. Salles, however, merely replaces the cliché of the macho anti-imperialist warrior with an equally one-dimensional image of a sensitive, James Dean-like picaro. Eric Gautier’s restrained cinematography, with its frequently hand-held evocations of the rough-hewn landscape, nicely complements Gael Garcia Bernal’s blessedly low-key performance as Che. On the most literal level, the film remains remarkably faithful to the details of Guevara and Granado’s wanderings through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, even though their visit to Machu Picchu takes on the flavour of a woozy travelogue. Yet, at almost every juncture, Salles’ adaptation either embellishes the source material with suspect melodramatic flourishes or expunges the charm of Guevara’s often wry observations.

To cite one of the most egregious examples of Salles and screenwriter José Rivera’s compulsion to “sex up” their adaptation, Guevara’s casual reference in the diaries to an evening where he swam across the Amazon becomes a full-fledged narrative crisis in the movie as the young hero barely escapes drowning. In addition, a pivotal incident involving one of Che’s acquaintances in Peru, Dr. Hugo Pesce, is oddly sentimentalized. According to Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s biography of Guevara, Pesce, the author of a book entitled Lattitudes del Silencio, became apoplectic after Che attacked this work “for describing landscapes badly and being pessimistic in his analysis of the Indians.” In the Salles version, Pesce evinces enormous gratitude for Che’s frankness—a minor discrepancy perhaps, but one that speaks to the film’s tendency to Hollywoodize the life of a man who is already a secular saint.

Salles’ preference for the youthful Guevara over the mature revolutionary may stem from the fact that, once Che and his comrades achieve power in Cuba, it becomes impossible to perform the alchemy of turning him into a Robert Redford liberal. Indeed, however much one might admire his defiance of the US and bemoan his murder in Bolivia at the hands of the CIA, Che was unquestionably an authoritarian leftist who admired the iron discipline of Lenin’s “democratic centralism” and had little patience for the Trotskyists and anarchists who were challenging Fidel from the left. Fine distinctions of this sort are rarely made in films that tackle politics and history, but as The Battle of Algiers demonstrates, films that succeed both as viable cinema and insightful history are well within the realm of possibility.