The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (not to mention the folks at Cinematical) seem to think that the one true film has emerged:
The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d’or. Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half hour epic Che, about the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role.
Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director’s flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured – the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first – and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che’s interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last.
The review gives more concrete reasons why the film is drawing such a mixed response, rather than the complaint that the film was just too long:
Despite its vast length, the movie covers very little of Guevara’s life. The early “Motorcycle Diaries” years (filmed by Walter Salles in 2004) are not dramatised, neither is the 1962 crisis, so we have no sense of whether Che could imagine endorsing a nuclear attack on the US from Cuban soil. The enigma of Che’s great parting with Fidel Castro (brilliantly impersonated here by Damiàn Bechir) after the revolution is not illuminated, so we have no sense of whether the break was amicable, or what their friendship was actually like. His tangled love life is only glancingly touched on.
This is all about Che the warrior, the ideologue, the public man. It is a real action movie, and the second half in particular shows Che’s jungle warfare, virtually in real time, moment by agonising moment. Like the battle for Havana in 1957, the Bolivian jungle shootouts are thrilling, and you get a real, visceral sense of what it was like; the danger, the hardship, the fear.
It is such big, bold, ambitious film-making: and yet I was baffled that Soderbergh fought shy of so many important things in Che’s personal life. Of course, it could be that he avoided them to avoid vulgar speculation, and felt that the two spectacles of revolution incarnate were more compelling: a secular Passion play. Whatever the reason, Che is never boring and often gripping.
No Response for "Che Candidate for the Palme?"
It is rare that we wind up with a Palme d’Or winner that receives prohibitively favorable reviews. Gus Van Sant’s brilliant ELEPHANT had it’s share of disparaging notices, same for the Coens’ BARTON FINK, David Lynch’s WILD AT HEART and especially Von Trier’s DANCER IN THE DARK and Loach’s THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. This lengthy art house offering is unsurprisingly headed in the same direction as can be well deduced from some of Sasha’s threads that follow this one. But the pre-eminence of the director—I even remember his forgotten gem KING OF THE HILL–well before his high-profile successes–makes it quintessential by any criteria.
Whats really interesting to see, how different the Reviews are, “Der Spiegel” one of the leading German Magazines calls it distanced and as boring as just looking at pictures of Che. The same thing happened with Indiana Jones, while celebrated in the English speaking press, most German outlets have trashed the movie as uninspired and unnecessary.
I still hope it will go to Ceylan
AO Scott wanted to like it; but ultimately, he just wanted to like it. Basically he didn’t really like it.
Oh, the movie was so long, they were handing out sandwiches.
Great point Sam, anything is possible with a Cannes jury. Each seems to maintain a welcome “fuck you” attitude. And I must say, when I finally catch up with their winners I’m generally pleased with the choice.
Thanks you so much sartre, and I do agree with you that they seem to get it more often than not. I was a huge fan of DANCER IN THE DARK, and Cannes really stood tall with its Palme d’Or win.
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