Che

Every so often they come along. Abel Gance’s Napoléon. Jacques Rivette’s Out One. Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Big movies. Big movies, in every sense. But, unravelling over more than four hours and two dialectical parts (formerly The Argentine and Guerrilla; now simply Che: Part One and Che: Part Two), Steven Soderbergh’s revolutionary chronicle about Argentine icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara is something else altogether. Something rare, something elusive and something that has to be experienced.

For starters, it’s impossible to think of any Hollywood director other than Soderbergh who could follow up a star-fucking romp like Ocean’s Thirteen with a $65 million, four-hour-plus, Spanish-language epic about an unknowable Marxist icon.

Talk about a staggeringly uncommercial oddity – and Che is one that will continue to offer up surprises, fascinations and frustrations. So what exactly do we have here? The last chance to see Lou Diamond Phillips in a good film? Well, yes, it’s that too. But whatever it is, Che is certainly no slog. Soulful, gripping and recklessly bold, Soderbergh’s film also emerges as one of the strangest propositions viewers have had to grapple with in years: an epic anti-biopic that lets us live with its subject for hours while never attempting to burrow under his psychological skin.

Distant, passionate and wheezing from asthma, Benicio del Toro provides not only an uncanny likeness of Che, but a supremely composed performance that remains impenetrably charismatic and enigmatic. Warmth, cruelty, wit and intelligence: it’s all there. But del Toro and Soderbergh constantly dodge attempts to define Che – either as a hero or a tyrant. Soderbergh’s film shrugs off any hyperbole and grandstanding, leapfrogs massive chunks of Che’s story and skips his personal life almost entirely as it traces his triumphant rebellion in Cuba and his disastrous attempt to pull the same trick in Bolivia.

Soulful, gripping and recklessly bold, Soderbergh’s film also emerges as one of the strangest propositions viewers have had to grapple with in years.

Despite its gargantuan runtime, Che tells us nothing about his background as a doctor, an intellectual or a father of five children. The early Motorcycle Diaries of Walter Salles’ 2004 film never appear. Nor does the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Or his mysterious schism from ‘comandante’ and confidant, Fidel Castro (another terrific embodiment by Demián Bichir).

Instead, this extraordinary portrait of the doctor/soldier/politician who became the T-shirt of the century is told through sad silences and forceful battle scenes. Part factual reconstruction, part naturalistic experiment, Che is full of compulsive contradictions: painstakingly detailed yet deliberately simplified; thrillingly lensed but with an erudite heft; beautiful but bloody; gigantic yet intimate.

In a remarkable move, Soderbergh has attempted to offer us Che through a kind of cinematic osmosis: showing us the birth, life and death of a revolution rather than a revolutionary. Watching Guevara through Soderbergh’s close-but-distant lens, we get a vision of a genius tactician and guerrilla warrior who makes fatal mistakes that lead to his end.

The two parts of Che are mirror images: the first showing us the triumph of a man inspiring a successful revolution; the second the doomed spiral of that man lost in fighting a failed one. Stitched together through jagged flashbacks, Che: Part One skips through the ‘50s and between Che’s early battlegrounds: the streets, the political arena and the jungle. After planning a revolution with Cuban exile Castro, Guevara goes guerrilla, leading a tiny insurgency against dictator Fulgencio Batista from the mountain jungles of the Sierra Maestra. Though Soderbergh inter-cuts Che’s visit to the New York canapé circuit as a speech-spouting Cuban government minister, it’s this extraordinary victory, which changed Latin American politics forever, that becomes the focus of Che’s opening half.

Brilliantly shot using a new lightweight digital camera, this first combat film unfolds with effortless melancholy, humour, intelligence and excitement. But it’s less a biopic than a military procedural: riveting, visceral, fearful and dangerous. After the battle of Santa Clara on the last day of 1958, Che’s extraordinary nous and astonishing daring cause the Batista government to crumble, blazing a path for a new communist era.

Then… we jump time. Picking up the story 10 years later, totally skipping Che’s brutal role in Castro’s dictatorship where he presided over hundreds of post-revolution executions. Instead, Part One spins into Part II. Everything that worked for Che in Cuba falls apart when he tries to spark the same revolutionary trick. Setting up a Cuban-funded guerrilla camp deep in the hostile Bolivian jungle, Guevara leads another small, embattled group of revolutionaries into a disastrous campaign. Instead of cheering on Che’s revolution, the locals reject it. Instead of recruiting new soldiers, Che’s beleaguered force starts fading away as his men are killed, struck down by illness or simply disappear.

Shot on the shoulder without flashbacks or fractures, it becomes a kind of psychological horror movie. Soderbergh shrinks Che’s world around him until he’s trapped alone in a grimy, exhausting bloodbath. The thrilling jungle shoot-outs of Part One are replaced by choked scrapes for survival, seemingly unfolding in agonising real-time. (It’s also worth mentioning a minor misstep in the shape of Matt Damon here, rupturing the film’s remarkable sensory bubble with an all-too-recognisable cameo.)

Yet still, the big issue is Soderbergh’s flat-out resistance to boring into Che’s psyche. There’s certainly a frustration in the film’s cagey reticence and its unwillingness to paint a full portrait. This, though, remains Soderbergh’s point. Hints of Che’s character – his bravery, intolerance, blindness, self-righteousness and humanity – are absorbed almost sub-consciously. Not through his words, but through his actions. Che’s story somehow becomes bigger than politics or autobiography, finally achieving something more existential than ideological. Shot in close-up for the first time and then – startlingly – in first-person, Guevara’s death scene makes for a strange and unexpectedly profound climax.

All of which is more than anything even Soderbergh has shown us before. More than any American director has for years. Is it a great film? We’ll say yes. And as with all great movies, its flaws are vital parts of its fascination. One thing’s for certain: whether it’s a meditation on guerrilla warfare, on Che or on moviemaking itself, you’ve seen nothing like it and are unlikely to ever again.

Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation:

The excitement has been building for months, though there was some counter-buzz at Cannes.

Enjoyment:

As baffling and frustrating as it is bold and brilliant.

In Retrospect:

Has the look and feel of a seminal film – one that may take years to fully absorb.