CHE Part 1: the argentine, CHE PART 2: GUERRILLA ss Directed by Steven Soderbergh Written by Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen
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With The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), director Walter Salles neatly sidestepped this challenge by confining himself to the prerevolutionary Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal), an Argentine medical student bumming around South America. The narrow historical parameters enabled Salles to indulge the idealized view of Guevara as a patron saint of the poor, and the movie grossed $57 million worldwide. Now Benicio Del Toro steps into the role in Steven Soderbergh’s two-part epic Che, which opens this week at Landmark’s Century Centre. Like The Motorcycle Diaries, each part focuses on a discrete period in Guevara’s life: the first covers his great triumph, the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, the second his great failure, the Bolivian campaign that ended with his capture and execution in 1967. But unlike Salles, Soderbergh makes a serious effort to get past the mythology with a detailed and relentlessly prosaic study of Che’s political and military tactics.
When a project like this rolls into town, people often ask me which part they should see, but Che Part 1: The Argentine and Che Part 2: Guerrilla are so tightly conceived as elements of a comparison-contrast thesis that there’s no point in watching either one by itself. The Argentine offers a little more historical and political perspective, framed as it is by black-and-white sequences of Guevara’s hackle-raising 1964 trip to New York City to address the United Nations on Castro’s behalf. There are also some early scenes of Guevara’s first meeting with Castro at a Mexico City dinner party in the summer of 1955 and of the tiny rebel force sailing toward Cuba aboard the Granma the following year. But most of the action takes place on the ground as the guerrillas make their way from the Sierra Maestra to the city of Santa Clara, where Guevara’s resounding victory sealed the fate of the Batista government (and allows Soderbergh to cut loose finally with some exciting action sequences).
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