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Che review
:. Director: Steven Soderbergh
:. Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Benjamin Bratt
:. Running Time: 4:18
:. Year: 2008
:. Country: USA
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Anti-dramatic, anti-charismatic and as anti-Hollywood as possible, the icon of the Cuban Revolution as seen by Steven Soderbergh puzzles and even disappoints. If only Ché were divided into two fairly distinct parts, giving the audience a break to catch their breath and get some energy to continue watching or to surrender their weapons and flee, but seen in its continuity and in its entirety, as it was presented at the 61st Cannes Film Festival (clocking in at 4hours and 30 minutes), the film inevitably ends up abandoning its audience in a jungle maze.
A long-term job which required years of research and gathering evidence from the four corners of the world, Ché clearly shows its bias. An ambitious biopic as long as the Amazon, it opens with Ernesto Guevara and his compadre Fidel Castro overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Mixing black and white and color and going back in time, as well as the use of filters like those already used in a more outrageous and meaningful way in Traffic, Soderbergh plays the realism card at all levels. The first phase includes scenes of Ché's trip to New York and his speech at the United Nations, shot in black and white, the arrival of rebels to Cuba by sea in 1956, and a large section is devoted to three years of battles in the jungle, until victory in Santa Clara in 1959. Close to Terrence Malick's style in The Thin Red Line, the scenes of combat take place in the jungle or in the streets of Santa Clara, and refrain from any demonstration or any other debauchery of pyrotechnic special effects. Here, the film marries the views of rebels; the enemy remaining virtually invisible.
Only here, whereas Malick manages to make the viewer empathetic in front of the fear and courage of combatants, Soderbergh only manages to annoy. The fault goes to his main character, played by Benicio Del Toro without charisma. Of course, the camera follows him in his travels, allows him to pronounce some aphorisms, but onscreen he's no emblematic figure, just a man commanding a handful of guerrillas who don't even attempt to look convincing. The film is spread across the jungle, on the lookout for adversaries to find a little boost of energy during the final phase of the conquest of the city.
The second half consists almost exclusively of Ché's disappearance and his reappearance in Bolivia where he tries to spread revolution throughout the continent of South America. More boring than ever, the second half leads the audience into the daily lives of Ché's recruits, whose days consist of some training and purchases of pork through local villagers, who are unconvinced by their cause. One could be seduced by the rough tone employed by the film to better serve the announced failure of the company, but to suffer the asthmatic hero's slow fall for two hours only gives reason to hope for his capture and summary execution as a relief.
If Soderbergh wanted to rally his audience to the cause of those who for decades have embodied the idea of rebellion, we are forced to admin he has failed. In the end, we leave this overly long adventure exhausted. Too loose to be captivating, too falsely sober to be convincing, too laconic to have a mass appeal.
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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