Che Part One

Che, the unconventional biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, opens with grainy black and white footage of an infamous figure wreathed in smoke. It’s Che, but we don’t recognise the physical qualities of the man at first, so much as the tell-tale Cuban cigar. The camera then pans out to show Che himself; he’s played by the acclaimed Puerto Ricon actor Benicio del Toro, who bears a startling resemblance to Guevara, despite being some ten years older than the revolutionary is in the film’s earliest scenes (earliest in the chronology of Che’s life- the film itself jumps here, there and everywhere, making the opening twenty minutes more than slightly confusing).

I should get my guilty confession out of the way now: I haven’t seen The Motorcycle Diaries, so Che director Steven Soderbergh’s claim that the film is best understood as the middle part of a trilogy, with The Motorcycle Diaries as its opening film, doesn’t really work for me. I did, however, know enough about Che Guevara to grasp what was going on, which is good since Soderbergh doesn’t exactly help the audience on that front. Indeed, the film plunges straight into a post-revolution interview with an American journalist in New York: Che is seen answering questions about the revolution before the audience has so much as been introduced to Fidel Castro. It’s a little frustrating.

I’m not usually swept away by guerrilla warfare films, but Che is compelling. Even when there’s not much fighting going on, the cinematography is to die for. The jungle is every single colour of green; the individual leaves jump out at you. The film intersperses the jungle warfare and later the urban fighting, with more grainy black and white footage (it’s like watching an old film reel) of Che in New York, being interviewed by an American journalist and even addressing the United Nations. But the address to the UN should really be the film’s climax: it’s an astounding oratory performance, and an excellent condemnation of the hollowness of American exportation of “freedom” abroad that still rings true today, but it comes too early on in the movie for the audience to feel it as it should be felt. Moreover, Benicio Del Toro himself is an excellent actor, but he’s given very little to do in Che. The camera never really gets close enough to intrude on the man’s thoughts. We get plenty of evidence of Che’s charisma from his relationship with the other fighters, but very little is shown of what drives him- what makes him human.

After the interminably grim, though excellent Defiance, Che is a breath of fresh air. It has light moments (Guevara thanking an American Senator for the Bay of Pings invasion is a particular favourite) but even the heavier parts are buoyed by Del Toro’s sheer likeability and the filmmakers’ obvious passion for the subject. One of the few problems with the film is some truly bad “suspense music” that breaks the credibility in a couple of places. Otherwise, however, it’s hard to come up with a major gripe with Che- except perhaps the fact that it‘s not really a film. It’s part one of a four hour epic and should no doubt be viewed that way. If you try to understand it as a film in its own right, the ending is deeply unsatisfying. In fact it’s reminiscent of the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, which closes with Sam and Frodo staring down into Mordor and the audience left waiting anxiously for the next part. Replace Mordor with Havana and you get the gist.

I hesitated to go and see Che. I suspected it to be all style over substance, and in a sense it kind of is. It’s also fucking good. Che is not an impartial attempt at a biopic; in fact there’s no neutrality at all in this reverent portrayal of one of history’s most iconic figures.