At the crossroads of revolution

“Bienvenida al [fin] del mundo,” he blurted into the phone. (Loosely translated: Welcome to the rump of the earth). After flying for 13 hours, not sleeping in 24 and only vaguely remembering when I had my last meal, I agreed with him that I had indeed, landed at the end of the earth -- Chile, to be exact, on the southernmost edge of South America.

I did it all for him -- Gael Garcia Bernal, 23 and already the star of some of Mexico’s most celebrated films. Beginning two years ago with “Amores Perros,” last year’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and this year’s “El Crimen del Padre Amaro,” he has come to represent Latin America’s new breed of filmmaking -- daring, visceral, subtly political.

It was his debut as the working-class street thug in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Oscar-nominated “Amores Perros” that first grabbed Hollywood’s attention. Like a Mexican Marlon Brando, Garcia Bernal transmits vulnerability beneath a bad-boy sexuality.

As director Gonzalez Inarritu sees him: “There is this internal complexity that he reflects in his eyes. He reminds me very much of River Phoenix; he has the same tenderness but also this sense of being on the edge. He has an ambivalence that is very interesting and that the camera loves.... He is a cinematic animal -- a type of animal that is almost extinct.”

But his path to stardom has been unusual, considering that his feature films have been small and -- outside Mexico -- foreign. If his luck holds, and he continues to land the right roles, he could be on his way to becoming a new breed of international movie actor. His current project, “The Motorcycle Diaries,” for example, is British-financed, directed by a Brazilian, about an Argentine revolutionary, starring a Mexican, with dialogue in Spanish and developed by an American company.

Given all this, I set out to interview Garcia Bernal in Chile on the location of “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Based on Ernesto (Che) Guevara’s personal record of his pilgrimage across South America, the film chronicles the seven-month journey in 1951-52 with his friend Alberto Granado that marked a turning point in young Guevara’s life -- a trip that would eventually transform Guevara from optimistic doctor-in-training into a stern Marxist insurgent.

I had been told that I would catch up with Garcia Bernal in the midsection of Chile, in a coastal industrial city called Valparaiso. Chile is as long as the United States is wide; bordered by the imposing Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, it boasts one of the world’s most diverse geographies, from scorched deserts to ski resorts.

But visiting a movie set is rarely as glamorous as it might seem. Usually, it is an exercise in frustration. Reporters are at the whim of temperamental stars or directors, held hostage by jittery publicists eager to keep prying eyes from the realities of the set.

I had been invited by Garcia Bernal’s representatives, but the company that financed the movie, Film4, had closed the set to all journalists. By the time this became clear, I was lost in Chile searching for Gael, following Ernesto Guevara’s trail.

On the trail

After a two-hour drive from the Santiago airport, passing through valleys lined with vineyards bathed in early morning fog, I arrived in Valparaiso, just north of Santiago. The cabdriver searched for an hour but could not find my hotel. So he dropped me off in the heart of the city, where I could make inquiries.

Valparaiso was once a thriving port town until the Panama Canal cut off its business in the early 20th century. Described by locals as San Francisco without the gold, Valparaiso’s downtown is grimy, with packs of street dogs scavenging for food and a place to sleep. The nicer part of the city was above, on hillsides that overlook the Pacific, dotted with brightly colored houses and lined with meandering stone paths. I wandered the narrow concrete streets, dragging luggage and my computer, as buses belched black smoke around me. I found a telephone and reached the film production scheduler based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had been sent to the wrong city. The hotel was in Temuco, a city about 500 kilometers -- or an eight-hour drive -- from Valparaiso.

The production was running a week behind schedule and would arrive in Valparaiso next week. Panicked, I checked into a hotel and made more phone calls. Around 7 p.m., I found a note slipped under my hotel room door from a “Micky.”

I called the number and asked for Micky in Spanish. I was greeted with “Hello” in English and the male voice correcting me: “This is Michael.” It was Michael Nozik, a producer on the film, overseeing the project for South Fork Pictures, part of Robert Redford’s production company.

He reassured me I would meet with Gael, but I had to fly to Temuco.

So I booked a flight for myself and a photographer. The closest photographer available happened to be in Argentina, so he immediately set out on a seven-hour bus trip across the Andes to meet me.

Next I haggled with Nozik and his assistant over the exact date of my interview -- Garcia Bernal, whom I had met briefly twice before, wanted to change it; I insisted on the agreed-upon date.

At 11 p.m. the night of my arrival in Chile, Garcia Bernal called: “Hey, you! What’s going on? How are you? Hey, I’m really sorry it was such a long trip but I am so glad you’re here. Thanks so much for coming. We’re going to have fun!”

Causes for the taking

The photographer and I arrived Sunday morning in Temuco, a city once considered the last frontier in Chile for 16th century Spanish conquerors.

The Spaniards were beaten back by the Mapuche Indians, known for their fierceness in battle. Temuco is deceptively peaceful. It rests on a verdant valley rimmed by volcanoes, crystal-clear lakes and mineral hot springs, and the air is crisp and clean with fluffy rain clouds drifting above.

But the other side to Temuco is spelled out on the city’s streets and in newspapers. As we drove into town, I noticed the graffiti: “Free the Mapuche Nation.”

The Mapuches, like Indians from Mexico, Peru and Central America, are rising up to demand their land back. The papers told the story of the latest flare-up: The week the production was filming in Temuco, Mapuches rioted, protesting the killing of a 17-year-old boy by police. They carried the dead boy’s casket to the governor’s palace. They closed down highways.

When Guevara and Granado rode through this region more than 50 years ago, they were given shelter by the Indians. Guevara wrote somewhat sarcastically in his diary, “we were like demigods, from Argentina no less, that wonderful country where [Col. Juan] Peron and his wife Evita lived, where the poor have as much as the rich and the Indian isn’t exploited or treated callously as he is in this country.”

In Chile at the time of Guevara’s journey, the standard of living was lower than in Argentina, unemployment was high, and many Chileans emigrated to Argentina “searching for the proverbial streets paved with gold... ,” Guevara wrote.

Flash forward to 2002: The week I was in Chile, the newspapers reported six Argentine children had died of starvation. Argentina’s economy is in shambles. Peru’s Marxist rebels continue to hide out in the jungle, Brazilian street children are shot by police for loitering, Venezuela is in revolt, and Colombia’s government is under fire from leftist rebels, rightist militias and drug lords.

A young revolutionary like Che would find no shortage of causes.

Argentina’s hardships and the Mapuche uprisings, I later find out, have had an impact on Garcia Bernal, whom I finally saw Sunday afternoon. He greeted me with a kiss and a large, black pebble from the Mapuche land as a keepsake. Several Mapuches were cast as extras in the film.

Walter Salles, director of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” later told me Garcia Bernal has a sponge-like ability to soak up his surroundings. Some of this he has learned as an actor. Most of it flows from his sensitivity and natural curiosity. He started acting as a 1-year-old, and spent most of his teen years starring in soap operas. But just as he became a soap heartthrob, at age 19 he left Mexico’s television world to study acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

“His capacity to adapt and to mold himself to situations is extraordinary,” Salles said. “And that is a great gift to the director.”

For “The Motorcycle Diaries,” Garcia Bernal has immersed himself in history, literature and politics. For the past three months, he has been reading Albert Camus, Karl Marx, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and biographies of Guevara. He has learned to play rugby and ride a motorcycle (so well he no longer uses a stunt double). By the end of the shoot, which is expected to go through the end of January when they reach the Peruvian Amazon, Garcia Bernal must lose as much as 15 pounds on his already slight frame. He wants to look as emaciated and run-down as the asthma-ridden Guevara did at the end of his journey.

On the afternoon I met with him, a pungent smell permeated his brown suede and wool jacket: dank, moldy and sweaty. Wearing brown jeans, boots, a torn olive-colored T-shirt on top of an orange long-sleeve jersey (an outfit he wore two days in a row), his black hair was impossibly full with bed-head. They had been shooting nights and he wore sleep on his face.

Taken separately, his features are not conventionally beautiful -- he has a distinctive, crooked nose, with a slight scar rounding the bridge. When his wide lips part, large incisor teeth flare out. He is smallish, 5 feet 7 with narrow shoulders and hips. His brown-sugar complexion is offset by light green eyes flecked with gold.

His beauty lies in those eyes. They emit a tremendous sadness and, alternately, a childlike glee.

Unlike with many Hollywood stars, you get the sense that he is humbled by his success. He is embarrassed by his popularity. He says he pursued a career in acting to have fun. And “The Motorcycle Diaries” begins in mischief. It is essentially a road movie about two young guys on an adventure who accidentally end up on a journey of self-discovery.

Garcia Bernal loves mischief. He greets every female fan -- some have driven miles to see him -- with a kiss on the cheek and happily poses for pictures with them. In Chile, there are no handlers holding back the fans and no paparazzi shooting his indiscretions. He reads each of the dozens of love notes that are left under his door when he comes back to his room. He gratefully accepts, as a parting gift, an opened bottle of wine that two girls have been slurping while waiting for him. When I asked him if he was afraid of the piranhas he might encounter in the Amazon (for an upcoming scene), he smiled and said, “Nah, I love to get bitten by little piranhas.”

One moment, he plays the naughty schoolboy; the next he is as intense as a philosophy student.

Right now he is tired. He has been filming and promoting movies nonstop for three years.

“I feel like a pingpong,” he says over dinner. “I need to recharge my batteries.”

He was raised in nonconformist ways by somewhat bohemian, leftist parents who worked in theater. His mother, Patricia Bernal, is an actress and former model. His father, Jose Angel Garcia, is a director. Although he does not like to talk about it, his parents divorced when Garcia Bernal was in elementary school.

Along with his mother, Garcia Bernal and his two siblings constantly moved from one Mexico City neighborhood to another. He was surrounded by artists and leftists.

But like most children, he longed for a normal, middle-class life. “You live in a society that pushes you into that,” he said. “I would have died to have a normal life -- which meant going to church on Sundays and joining a country club. Now I am so grateful I was not raised like that.”

He was only 9 at the time, but he says he vividly remembers Mexico’s 1988 presidential election -- marred by allegations of fraud -- when leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas lost out to Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari. At 16, Garcia Bernal met Mexico’s pipe-smoking, masked renegade, Subcommander Marcos.

Although Garcia Bernal is turned on by politics, he is uncomfortable with overtly political movies. He was disappointed with “El Crimen del Padre Amaro,” which happens to be playing in Temuco’s only movie theater during our visit. The film, which is the highest-grossing Mexican movie ever in its home country, raised the ire of conservative Catholics and endured calls for boycotts and protests. It is Mexico’s official entry for the 75th Academy Awards’ foreign-language film category. In the United States, the film has done well, grossing $3.1 million in limited release. But Garcia Bernal says he disliked the movie’s lack of ambivalence and subtlety. (Garcia Bernal is in negotiations to star next in Pedro Almodovar’s “La Mala Educacion” [A Bad Education]. Inspired by Almodovar’s Catholic schoolboy days, the director promises it will be hard on the church.)

Director Salles says he is determined not to make “The Motorcycle Diaries” overtly political. Just as he illustrated Brazil’s desperate poverty and ruthless treatment of children in “Central Station” through the story of a young boy and an older woman, he says “The Motorcycle Diaries” will depict Ernesto Guevara’s journey to becoming “Che” Guevara, the gun-toting revolutionary.

It will be one of two Guevara movies in the works. The other, to be produced by Steven Soderbergh and Laura Bickford, will star Benicio Del Toro as Guevara in the latter part of his life.

Although this will be Garcia Bernal’s second time playing Guevara (the first, which he says he would rather forget, was in the HBO biopic “Fidel”), he knows a lot is at stake.

“I feel a certain amount of insecurity about it,” he said.

“I feel a lot of responsibility. I want to do it well because of what he represents to the world. He is a romantic. He had a political consciousness that changed Latin America.”

The shadow of Guevara, the patron saint of revolution, still looms over Latin America. To many young people, his image represents bravery, rebellion, freedom, justice. But it is hard to know where the real Guevara ends and the myth begins. The book “The Motorcycle Diaries” is a bit anticlimactic, promising but not delivering epiphanies.

Journalist Alma Guillermoprieto describes him in her collection of essays as a “harsh angel” incapable of living with peace, constantly in search of revolution:

“So many incinerated lives: the would-be guerrillas who starved to death in northern Argentina, the young men drowned in vats of excrement in Brazil, the eviscerated martyrs of Guatemala, the sociology student in Argentina whose severed hands were delivered in a jar to her mother -- the children of Che.”

But Garcia Bernal takes a magnanimous view of those he portrays, and seems unfazed by Guevara’s more ruthless side. He’s a softy for his characters, whether he is playing Guevara, the nasty street kid in “Amores Perros,” the horny teen in “Y Tu Mama Tambien” or the ambitious, amoral priest in “El Crimen del Padre Amaro.”

He views them all with compassion and recognition of himself. What unites them -- and what attracts Garcia Bernal -- is their evolution as people.

“They are all searching for an identity,” he said. “Film does that to you, it makes you root for the bad guy.”

He is not afraid to show weakness and vulnerability, said Alfonso Cuaron, who directed him in “Y Tu Mama Tambien.”

“I think a lot of actors of his generation are tied to this image of what a man should be: A man needs to be cool, tough, rough and they must repress certain emotions,” said Cuaron. “He does not do that. He has this docile intensity.”

In the final scene for “Amores Perros,” Garcia Bernal is waiting for his girlfriend at a bus stop. But she never shows up. He must decide to stay and find her or run away from his street life.

It is a heartbreaking scene in which his physicality says it all: His puffy eyes are moist with tears, his head shaved, face bruised.

Gonzalez Inarritu said he wanted to surprise Garcia Bernal and brought his father on to play the driver of the bus. But he had no idea the depth of feelings it would evoke.

As they began the scene, the driver turned to Garcia Bernal and said, “So, young man, are you coming or not?” When Garcia Bernal looked up and saw his father, whom he had not seen in months, he crumbled.

“He just stopped and hugged him for a really long time,” the director told me by phone. “He started to cry like a little boy. It was very emotional.”

An emotional journey

If riding across South America was Ernesto Guevara’s passage into manhood, making “The Motorcycle Diaries” has become an emotional and psychological journey for Garcia Bernal.

His life has changed so dramatically that he longs for more mundane activities.

“I miss playing soccer with Diego,” he said, referring to his childhood friend Diego Luna, his co-star in “Y Tu Mama Tambien”.

“I want more time to absorb my surroundings and contemplate. I miss that urge to want to live in other parts of the world. I miss the fruit and the fruit waters of Mexico.... I want to fall in love.”

His home is a four-story walk-up in the historic district of downtown Mexico City, but he is rarely there. Though he has plenty of women around, he says he wants a meaningful relationship. About acting, he readily acknowledges he is still very green and has “a lot to learn.”

Garcia Bernal’s career has taken off in part because of timing. Not only is Latin America blossoming with interesting movie projects, but the United States is more keen on tapping talent from abroad.

With “Amores Perros” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien” leading the way, filmmakers across Latin America have churned out their own box-office hits in the past two years. This past year, nearly every country in Latin America had at least one film that outperformed a Hollywood movie at the home country’s box office. Countries like Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay produced native movies that broke records.

As I leave Chile, I notice the papers are tracing Garcia Bernal’s every move. He is widely recognized even in little cities like Temuco. Guevara’s picture is often printed alongside his. It is hard to imagine such photos dominating the entertainment pages of Chilean newspapers only a decade ago. Under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Guevara was a hero worshiped in secret.

“He was a communist, and Pinochet was not very fond of communists,” our Temuco cabdriver, Don Eduardo, commented wryly on the way to the airport. But Chile today has a socialist president and the defense minister is a woman once tortured by Pinochet’s security police and whose father was killed by them.

His role as Guevara is full of symbolism; the Argentine guerrilla who became a Latin American revolutionary will be portrayed by a Mexican actor on his way to becoming a Latin American cultural touchstone.

I had set out on my own South American odyssey in pursuit of a movie star. I ended up finding something else.

“ ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ changed what it meant to be Latin American. Magical Realism was dead,” Chilean screenwriter and novelist Alberto Fuguet explained over lunch. “We recognize ourselves in Gael. He carries around a Walkman and at the same time wears an Indian wool hat. He has become a large part of a cultural awakening.”