Che: Parts One and Two

In the four decades since his death, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has remained an icon of popular culture while our knowledge of the man has become as threadbare as many of the T-shirts that bear his image. With Che, Benicio Del Toro and Stephen Soderbergh set out in earnest to educate us. Rather than a classic biopic the director gives us two exhaustively detailed - and at times exhausting - procedurals of guerrilla war, released as two separate films.

Che: Part 1 (***) plunges us directly into the day-to-day concerns of the Cuban Revolution. Action is sporadic, short-lived and confused; questions of ideology and discipline are debated at length in jungle clearings. Che’s growth as a gifted, meticulous leader and fiercely committed revolutionary is carefully documented but there is little room for much sense of an inner life. It is the details which keep the attention: the élan of the cigar-smoking, bearded freedom fighters; a row of pens in the top pocket of a combat jacket an unlikely symbol of rank.

Where the first film ponderously plots the course of a successful revolution, Part 2 (****) recounts Che’s doomed attempt to foment one in Bolivia. Disowned by the local communist party, and receiving little support from an indifferent local population, Che’s band is pursued through the forests by government forces. A sense of intimacy and tragedy accompanies Che in his flight, the tragedy of a man whose commitment to an ideal of revolution propels him to an ignominious death in a foreign land. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]