Ché - Part One
Screening: Monday 24 May 2010
France/Spain/USA 2008.Director: Stephen Soderberg.
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Benjamin Bratt, Demián Bichir.
Subtitles.
Certificate: 15. 129 minutes.
Synopsis
The 1st January 2009 was the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his replacement by Fidel Castro. This first film of the two-part work by Steven Soderbergh shows Ché (Benicio Del Toro) meeting the exiled Fidel (Demián Bichir) in Mexico City in 1955 to plan the invasion, followed by the landfall on Cuba with his fellow insurrectionists and the lead up to their victory, all intercut with Ché’s sensational appearance at the United Nations in New York in 1964.It's a well-researched film, based in part on Ché’s posthumously published “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War”. It is all about Ché the ideologue, the legendary comandante and. unlike The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) directed by Brazilian Walter Salles, this movie is neither romantic nor even particularly partisan.
It shows Ché’s public persona and if he is feeling vulnerable or is suffering agonies of doubt, we are unaware of them. He is not someone we completely understand. Soderbergh has dispensed with scenes showing character flaws as if he were rejecting the usual biopic convention of pretending to know what is going inside some historical character's head. For instance, we never know what was behind Ché’s parting with Castro after the revolution. Was the break amicable or did they fall out? Despite this, the movie gives a real-life sense of what it must have been like to actually be there and the battle scenes are thrilling.
Puerto Rican film star Del Toro gives a stunning lead performance and he is ably assisted by a brilliant impersonation of Castro by Demián Bichir.
Is (Soderbergh) saying that no-one could ever really know this inscrutable figure? Or, perhaps, that the myth has consumed the man? — Mark Savage on the BBC website
The film is elaborately restrained, with a kind of documentarian's clampdown on dramatic or narrative temperature, and yet I found it involving. Steven Soderbergh's cinematography and Juan Pedro de Gaspar's art direction create a superbly persuasive sense of mood, time and place. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
...superlatively crafted, dramatically compelling... At its best, Ché is both action film and ongoing argument. — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
