Che Part One: The Argentine

Tonight Steven Soderbergh's epic 'Che'. Well part one anyway; the original four-hour film has been cut into two parts. The first part is known as 'The Argentine'.

'Che: Part One' is probably best described as a 'slow burner'. So don't have a pint before it and one during it, as I did. Also, don't tire yourself out cycling to and from work, as I did, because you might miss vital batches of subtitles if you briefly rest your eyes. Another vital tip is don't choose a cinema that is full of restless folk with weak bladders; apart from the icy draft you get from an ever open door, you are also liable to miss more of those vital subtitles as people block the screen on their way back to their seats. It's certainly a popular film; everyone must have come to find out more about the man on that famous t-shirt. They may well go home disappointed.

The story opens with Ernesto 'Che' Guevara at a dinner party in Mexico where he meets Fidel Castro for the first time. Castro convinces Guevara to turn his back on a career as a doctor and instead join his '26th of July Movement'. Guevara is then heavily involved as Castro's men invade Cuba with the aim of removing the United States backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.



The film is shot a bit like a 'fly on the wall' documentary but there is no narration, the only aid is a few titles flashed on screen indicating the date and the place. As the revolutionaries march across Cuba, reading literature, puffing on cigars and occasionally spouting a bit of revolutionary wisdom, Soderbergh leaves the viewer to fill in the missing bits themselves. It's not a film that educates me about Guevara as I had hoped and it means that you really need a good grasp of the facts before you go. I guess this accounts for a lot of the restlessness in the cinema.



Guevara goes on to play a key role in the two-year guerilla campaign, that eventually achieves its aim. He rises through the ranks and becomes 'Comandante'. The film shows us a lot of battles along the way but never in any great detail and it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp the overall picture. Often I can't quite see what the army are doing, or trying to achieve. Often when the guerilla warfare threatens to get interesting, we skip off to see Guevara years later, at the United Nations. Then when we return, we are some place else but we don't really know why we are there or again, quite what is happening.

Overall, despite the confusion, it's a beautifully shot film and I grow to like Guevara the man. The film paints him as quite a nice guy and as a rebel with a cause. He even gets a bit of eye candy among his revolutionaries with the arrival of Aleida, his future wife.



The film redeems itself in last twenty minutes or so, as it picks up the pace and gets more absorbing. The story stays in the 'present' and concentrates on the battle for 'Santa Clara'. This was the decisive victory of the campaign, after which Batista fled Cuba and Castro's forces claimed overall victory.



I was really looking forward to this film but found it quite unsatisfying. If you know all about Guevara then I imagine you'll love it because you'll be able to follow it, if you don't, then like me, you're in trouble. It did at least inspire me to find out more about Guevara, so I went away and looked up all the details but I'm not sure how many of the audience will be bothered to do that. It will be interesting to see how full the cinema is for part two.