Che - Part One and Two - The Complete Story (15)

In July 1964, a few months before Ernesto Che Guevara arrived in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, Andy Warhol set up a camera on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building. Over one long summer night, the avant-garde artist shot eight hours of uninterrupted footage of the Empire State Building.

The movie – a single, immobile real-time shot of the steel and granite needle towering over the city – was a landmark in minimalism. It boldly asked audiences to ignore boredom and bum-freeze and study the (then) tallest building in the world as both a concrete object and a towering symbol.

Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part One And Two may have a hell of a lot more action (and editing) than Warhol’s architectural epic but it shares the same sense of monolithic presence. Che is a perverse, perhaps even revolutionary, biopic that refuses to shoot the iconic T-shirt image of the martyred Argentine guerrilla leader.

Instead it asks us to observe and contemplate him over time, its two parts tied to each other – glory in Cuba then an inexorable march towards defeat in Bolivia – as surely as darkness follows sunset over Warhol’s skyscraper.

“I was trying to avoid the conceits of the biographical film,” elaborates Soderbergh in a lightweight junket interview bundled on this two-disc set. “I wasn’t interested in the traditional, big movie moments – the things that they show as clips on television... I’m not going to have the scene where his hat falls off and someone hands him a beret.”

Having battled for eight years alongside star Benicio Del Toro to get the project bankrolled – two movies, four hours, shot in Spanish; who’d touch that with a $60 million bargepole? – the filmmaker apparently didn’t see the point in turning in an approachable biopic like Milk, W., or the crowd-friendly verbal parry of Frost/Nixon.

Che offers no hand-holding. Even its opening image is a cheeky affront to the idea of spoonfeeding the audience – a map of Cuba’s different zones hanging on the screen for what seems like an age without telling us anything we desperately need to know. There’s no neat summary of the Batista regime, or Cuba’s history, just that map.

Then we’re thrown into Che as Guevara attends the United Nations, scattershot black-and-white newsreel-style close-ups (the boots, the cigar, the beard) warning us that this won’t be a rounded portrait of the man but a jagged, fractured glimpse of a life in the process of being lived.

It’s a movie easier to define by what’s missing than what isn’t. There’s no subplot; Che’s family is barely seen; his relationship with Castro is sketchy; his years in Cuba’s government getting his hands bloody with political executions or leading a failed uprising in the Congo completely excised.

Even the movie’s meat, the guerrilla fighting that Che leads through Cuba and, later, the scrub forest of Bolivia, lacks any sort of punctuation. Indistinct incidents – battles, injuries, hardships – elide into one another without giving any sense of the bigger picture.

Yet the action is immersive. Urban street fighting captures the zing of bullets on masonry while the all-new digital RED camera lets Soderbergh, who doubled as cinematographer using his usual Peter Andrews pseudonym, jog along behind the rebels or hunker down with them in the dirt as they come under fire.

Seen as a whole, over four hours, Che becomes an incredible experience. Del Toro deserves huge credit for that, his ebullient charisma investing this historical personage with a presence that leaves us in no doubt how he convinced men to spend years in the jungle fighting for a revolutionary principle that was ahead of its time.

The more we’re left to observe him, the more real he seems. Throwaway incidents become deeply affecting, as when an old peasant woman visits one of his impromptu pueblo clinics simply because she’s never seen a doctor before. There, in Del Toro’s reaction, is the soul of this man – his Marxist belief in social equality rendered living and breathing in a flash of human sympathy. In a single scene Che does what it took Walter Salles a whole movie to do in The Motorcycle Diaries.

“We didn’t have a motive of trying to make him more likeable or less likeable,” explains Del Toro in another of the discs’ disappointingly thin talkingheaders. “We tried to stay as impartial as possible. Our goal was to make sure, what we filmed, no one could tell us that didn’t happen.” Stripped of hackneyed emotional arcs and cheap biopic tics, Che becomes neither a character nor an icon but a man – as unknowable as we all are to one another.

In the interview, Soderbergh recalls a telling comment from one of Che’s comrades-in-arms about the distant guerrilla leader: “You had to love him for free.” The same could be said of the director’s austere anti-biopic, a film that doesn’t try to praise or bury Che, just lets him be.

DVD Extras:

• Making of
• Interviews
• Trailers

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