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I've mentioned Mexican cinema a few times, including this actor's first films. I was pleasantly surprized to find this 'boy' intelligent and philosophical. He speaks of Mexico and Latin America in ways I am not used to reading outside literature; I also like his criticism of Spaniards <grin>. - Perdita
Mexican rave - Gaby Wood, The Observer, August 1, 2004
The boy who is sitting reading the paper in the window of the cafe, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap, turns out to be Gael García Bernal. He looks like a shy philosophy student, but he is Hollywood's next big hope: an actor who, at the age of 25, has already appeared in 14 films and been referred to as the Latin James Dean. He has starred in two of the most popular exports in the current new wave of Latin American cinema (Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También), and in Mexico's equivalent of Titanic (The Crime of Father Amaro, which broke all box-office records). This year he is in two more excellent movies (Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and Walter Salles's screen version of Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries) and he has just finished shooting an American film, The King, alongside Daryl Hannah and Sam Shepard. One advantage of all this, he says sweetly, is that, since the kitchens in most restaurants in Manhattan are run by Mexicans, he is treated royally when he visits.
. . .
(In Almodóvar's film Bernal plays a drag queen, among other parts)
He says it was incredible the way people would treat him differently - even people he was working with on set, who'd seen him get dressed in drag. 'They'd move things a little closer so I could reach them, ask me if I wanted anything ... They'd do whatever I asked them. Because I was a woman!'
García Bernal spent eight months filming in Spain, and Spaniards would warn him he was going to find it difficult to play the transvestite, because Mexico was very macho. 'They're such wankers,' he says, muttering something about colonialist values. 'They think Mexico's macho! Hold on, let's just do an experiment here ...' He picks up his Spanish newspaper and flicks through it. 'Every day there's a story in this paper that goes, "Man Kills Daughter and Mother". Always. In Spain, domestic violence is really bad. I mean, thank God they denounce it, but it's there. I'd try to explain to them that Mexican machismo isn't about the guy who's holding his wife in a headlock, it 's more like you're thought to be macho if you can sleep with a poof. It's a different thing,' he concludes confidently, as if these fine cultural distinctions made automatic sense. 'Theirs is much more harsh.'
. . .
But when we talk about 'the soap opera', as he calls it, of Mexican politics, the level of his engagement becomes very clear. He speaks in terms of 'Olympic goals for the opposition', and sorts the genuinely left-wing from the centrist converts. 'I love the whole democratic progress that's taking place - things are moving very fast,' he enthuses. He is describing a very interesting phase, a newly democratic era for Mexico, in which corruption is laid bare and there's a lot being said that couldn't (or at least wouldn't) have been said before. To a large extent this is reflected in the country's cultural output: there is something bracingly liberated about the movies being made there now - one very strong reason, surely, for their popularity - and more than anyone, García Bernal is their embodiment and their mouthpiece.
'I feel that in Mexico there's an absurd perception [of conservatism],' he reflects. 'We're only conservative until we realise we're not. You know, Mexico really isn't. Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También are not films you'd think of as big box-office, and yet they were huge hits in Mexico. And so I think that in many ways society there is much more advanced than it's thought to be.'
Perhaps it's fitting that this articulate idealist should have been chosen to play the young Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries describes an eight-month journey across Latin America, which a 23-year-old Guevara, not yet known as Che, took with his friend Alberto Granado. Granado, who is still alive, was a biochemist; Guevara was training to be a doctor. On the back of a rusty 13-year-old motorbike, they travelled from Argentina into Chile, over frozen lakes and snowcapped mountains, up to Machu Picchu, and on to a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon. This was two years before Guevara met Fidel Castro, seven years before the Cuban revolution. 'He had a set of moral beliefs which later became political ones. But at that time, it was more like he was in search of a certain truth,' García Bernal suggests.
In the film, the travellers meet Quechua Indians, miners, Communists on the run, and Guevara learns about power. He is fair-minded and fragile: his asthma is presented not merely as a fact but as a symbolic risk - he knows what it's like to fear for your life, and this somehow equalises everything. The film focuses on Guevara's frankness and his bedside manner. He is a messianic sort of doctor, and García Bernal plays him tenderly, with a sweet face poised on the brink of knowledge.
. . .
García Bernal was more or less the same age as Guevara was when he made the film, and the shoot took him on a similar journey, both geographically and, he indicates, mentally. 'The thing is,' he tells me, 'Che and his work invite you to get to know yourself, to self-reflection. It's a trip about losing yourself and finding yourself. Americans are always comparing him to Kerouac, which is the most ridiculous thing - Kerouac's all about screwing everyone and getting into trouble; it's nothing to do with recognising that you're a part of the context you live in, which is the trip Che and Granado made.'
He is referring here to the sentiments summed up in a famous passage from the book, a speech he gives beautifully in the film, and which goes, in part, like this: 'We believe,' Guevara wrote, 'and after this journey more firmly than ever, that the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictitious .We constitute a single mestizo race ... and so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to a United Latin America.'
'Che still belongs to Latin Americans, in a way,' García Bernal muses, 'because when we travel, we realise that we're all from different parts of the world but that we share a single territory. There are very fragile bridges built and destroyed and rebuilt every time we undertake a voyage to find out where we're from. The fact of being born in Latin America gives you the freedom and the right to take part in that search, and that introspection, which is very lovely, and very unique.'
So what did he find?
'Well, for example, it leads you to ask almost semiotic questions, like: what does "underdevelopment" mean, for us? Really, it's something completely different from the concept as the IMF or global politics understand it. They'd apply it to a Quechua Indian who doesn't speak Spanish. I wouldn't call that person underdeveloped. What I'm saying is that when it comes down to it they have their culture. In a way, that's what we have to fight for. You know, we may be chatting here, but I owe a lot to the fact that I was born in Guadalajara and that I've been taught how to cook carne en su jugo.' He laughs, and looks into his tea. 'I don't know - I think the process of colonialism continues ... '
Walter Salles, the film's director, has said that García Bernal was 'more than an actor on this journey; he was one of the main catalysts of our filmic adventure'. The screenwriter, Jose Rivera, has described the film's plot as 'the inner geography of a boy turning into a man'. García Bernal says he became another person after he finished filming. He speaks about watching his younger siblings grow up - seeing them change from one day to the next - and sits back in a kind of helpless awe. 'When you see someone's conscience awakening,' he says, 'puta! It's incredible.' full article
Mexican rave - Gaby Wood, The Observer, August 1, 2004
The boy who is sitting reading the paper in the window of the cafe, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap, turns out to be Gael García Bernal. He looks like a shy philosophy student, but he is Hollywood's next big hope: an actor who, at the age of 25, has already appeared in 14 films and been referred to as the Latin James Dean. He has starred in two of the most popular exports in the current new wave of Latin American cinema (Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También), and in Mexico's equivalent of Titanic (The Crime of Father Amaro, which broke all box-office records). This year he is in two more excellent movies (Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and Walter Salles's screen version of Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries) and he has just finished shooting an American film, The King, alongside Daryl Hannah and Sam Shepard. One advantage of all this, he says sweetly, is that, since the kitchens in most restaurants in Manhattan are run by Mexicans, he is treated royally when he visits.
. . .
(In Almodóvar's film Bernal plays a drag queen, among other parts)
He says it was incredible the way people would treat him differently - even people he was working with on set, who'd seen him get dressed in drag. 'They'd move things a little closer so I could reach them, ask me if I wanted anything ... They'd do whatever I asked them. Because I was a woman!'
García Bernal spent eight months filming in Spain, and Spaniards would warn him he was going to find it difficult to play the transvestite, because Mexico was very macho. 'They're such wankers,' he says, muttering something about colonialist values. 'They think Mexico's macho! Hold on, let's just do an experiment here ...' He picks up his Spanish newspaper and flicks through it. 'Every day there's a story in this paper that goes, "Man Kills Daughter and Mother". Always. In Spain, domestic violence is really bad. I mean, thank God they denounce it, but it's there. I'd try to explain to them that Mexican machismo isn't about the guy who's holding his wife in a headlock, it 's more like you're thought to be macho if you can sleep with a poof. It's a different thing,' he concludes confidently, as if these fine cultural distinctions made automatic sense. 'Theirs is much more harsh.'
. . .
But when we talk about 'the soap opera', as he calls it, of Mexican politics, the level of his engagement becomes very clear. He speaks in terms of 'Olympic goals for the opposition', and sorts the genuinely left-wing from the centrist converts. 'I love the whole democratic progress that's taking place - things are moving very fast,' he enthuses. He is describing a very interesting phase, a newly democratic era for Mexico, in which corruption is laid bare and there's a lot being said that couldn't (or at least wouldn't) have been said before. To a large extent this is reflected in the country's cultural output: there is something bracingly liberated about the movies being made there now - one very strong reason, surely, for their popularity - and more than anyone, García Bernal is their embodiment and their mouthpiece.
'I feel that in Mexico there's an absurd perception [of conservatism],' he reflects. 'We're only conservative until we realise we're not. You know, Mexico really isn't. Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También are not films you'd think of as big box-office, and yet they were huge hits in Mexico. And so I think that in many ways society there is much more advanced than it's thought to be.'
Perhaps it's fitting that this articulate idealist should have been chosen to play the young Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries describes an eight-month journey across Latin America, which a 23-year-old Guevara, not yet known as Che, took with his friend Alberto Granado. Granado, who is still alive, was a biochemist; Guevara was training to be a doctor. On the back of a rusty 13-year-old motorbike, they travelled from Argentina into Chile, over frozen lakes and snowcapped mountains, up to Machu Picchu, and on to a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon. This was two years before Guevara met Fidel Castro, seven years before the Cuban revolution. 'He had a set of moral beliefs which later became political ones. But at that time, it was more like he was in search of a certain truth,' García Bernal suggests.
In the film, the travellers meet Quechua Indians, miners, Communists on the run, and Guevara learns about power. He is fair-minded and fragile: his asthma is presented not merely as a fact but as a symbolic risk - he knows what it's like to fear for your life, and this somehow equalises everything. The film focuses on Guevara's frankness and his bedside manner. He is a messianic sort of doctor, and García Bernal plays him tenderly, with a sweet face poised on the brink of knowledge.
. . .
García Bernal was more or less the same age as Guevara was when he made the film, and the shoot took him on a similar journey, both geographically and, he indicates, mentally. 'The thing is,' he tells me, 'Che and his work invite you to get to know yourself, to self-reflection. It's a trip about losing yourself and finding yourself. Americans are always comparing him to Kerouac, which is the most ridiculous thing - Kerouac's all about screwing everyone and getting into trouble; it's nothing to do with recognising that you're a part of the context you live in, which is the trip Che and Granado made.'
He is referring here to the sentiments summed up in a famous passage from the book, a speech he gives beautifully in the film, and which goes, in part, like this: 'We believe,' Guevara wrote, 'and after this journey more firmly than ever, that the division of [Latin] America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictitious .We constitute a single mestizo race ... and so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to a United Latin America.'
'Che still belongs to Latin Americans, in a way,' García Bernal muses, 'because when we travel, we realise that we're all from different parts of the world but that we share a single territory. There are very fragile bridges built and destroyed and rebuilt every time we undertake a voyage to find out where we're from. The fact of being born in Latin America gives you the freedom and the right to take part in that search, and that introspection, which is very lovely, and very unique.'
So what did he find?
'Well, for example, it leads you to ask almost semiotic questions, like: what does "underdevelopment" mean, for us? Really, it's something completely different from the concept as the IMF or global politics understand it. They'd apply it to a Quechua Indian who doesn't speak Spanish. I wouldn't call that person underdeveloped. What I'm saying is that when it comes down to it they have their culture. In a way, that's what we have to fight for. You know, we may be chatting here, but I owe a lot to the fact that I was born in Guadalajara and that I've been taught how to cook carne en su jugo.' He laughs, and looks into his tea. 'I don't know - I think the process of colonialism continues ... '
Walter Salles, the film's director, has said that García Bernal was 'more than an actor on this journey; he was one of the main catalysts of our filmic adventure'. The screenwriter, Jose Rivera, has described the film's plot as 'the inner geography of a boy turning into a man'. García Bernal says he became another person after he finished filming. He speaks about watching his younger siblings grow up - seeing them change from one day to the next - and sits back in a kind of helpless awe. 'When you see someone's conscience awakening,' he says, 'puta! It's incredible.' full article
