Nicholas Murgatroyd

Che: Part One (2008), dir. Steven Soderbergh

In Walter Salles’ road movie The Motorcycle Diaries, Gael Garcia Bernal portrayed the young Che Guevara as a well-meaning medical student developing a sense of social justice as he rode through South America. In Steven Soderbergh’s Che: Part One, Benicio Del Toro tackles the arguably much more difficult task of portraying Guevara as the iconic revolutionary familiar from T-shirts, posters in student bedrooms and innumerable pin badges. He has to not only persuade the viewer that he is that icon, but that the icon himself was something more than the pose immortalised in Alberto Korda’s image.

The film starts in New York in 1964 as Guevara prepares to address the UN assembly as the representative of the Cuban government. Shot in black and white, as if in homage to Korda’s photograph, the familiar iconography is quickly established, from the cigar to the swirling sideburns, as Che is interviewed by a journalist. This brief stay in New York is returned to at various moments in the film. We see Guevara attack American Imperialism at the UN, thank Eugene McCarthy for the way the Bay of Pigs Invasion unified the Cuban people, face abuse from crowds of Cuban exiles, and survive a failed mortar attack (the latter is a strange episode that features briefly and then drops out of the film without further explanation, like the mortar itself disappears into the depths of the East River). Yet although Del Toro is impressive in these flashforwards, I couldn’t help feeling that they could either have been edited down or not interspersed as regularly as they are, because they threaten to distract from the main narrative, which is Che’s role in the overthrow of Batista.

This begins at a dinner party in Mexico City where a clean-shaven Fidel Castro and Guevara meet and agree a plan to invade Cuba, where they soon head onboard a ship. In contrast to the scenes in New York, the Cuban revolution is shot in rich, warm colours, and the Spanish dialogue is subtitled rather than translated by an interpreter. It’s in these sections where del Toro gives full life to Che. Apart from occasional glimpses of Che’s discomfort at the way he’s feted by some Americans as a living icon, we see little of Che as a person in New York, but in Cuba we see him as a rounded human being.
There are times when he is the superhero of the revolution, whether inspiring his men or defending the poor and the dispossessed, firing a bazooka or coolly informing the chief of police that he can either surrender or be responsible for any ensuing bloodshed. However, we also see the frail, human side of him, from the asthma that plagued him to the suspicion that his Argentine nationality makes some of the Cubans see him as an outsider. It is in these moments that Del Toro shows his considerable skill as an actor, conveying great depths of emotion through a subtle and understated performance of a kind rarely associated with biopics. It’s a masterclass in how to act an icon that rightly won him the award for best actor at Cannes last year and makes his absence from this year’s Oscar nominations bewildering.

The film follows Che throughout the Cuban revolution up to the eve of the entrance into La Habana. One consequence of this is that key figures like Castro only enter the action when they meet Guevara, but although the supporting cast is very good, Del Toro’s brooding presence constantly dominates the screen. In moments when he’s not in shot, we wait for the camera to come back to him and return the film once more to its revolutionary heart.

If there are any quibbles with the film, they’re that, like the recent The Baader Meinhof Complex, the dialogue has an occasional tendency to sound like it’s been lifted from a primer for revolutionaries, and the violence can also be a little clean and unrealistically bloodless. Yet neither of these detract greatly from a well-directed and extremely well-acted film that represents a return for Soderbergh to the auteur status he seemed to have rejected when he immersed himself in the dollar-rich franchise of the Ocean’s Eleven films. (I’ll spare you a link to those.)

Che: Part One ends with a flashback to the Mexico City dinner party and Guevara’s determination to take the revolution to South America after Cuba. After the joyous approach to La Habana seen here, Che: Part Two, due for release in February, will follow that story to its far less ecstatic end.

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