Che: Part One

Che: Part One (2008) covers the Cuban Revolution. Ernesto Guevara meets Fidel Castro in Mexico, lands in Cuba aboard the Granma, and the guerrilla war begins in the Sierra Maestra. The film runs up to the arrival in Havana. Steven Soderbergh shot both parts on the RED One digital camera, one of the first major productions to use it. The structure has two layers. The Sierra Maestra material is in colour and widescreen; Guevara's 1964 trip to New York to address the United Nations is in black and white, handheld, with a 16mm feel. The two cut against each other throughout. Benicio del Toro plays Guevara and won Best Actor at Cannes in 2008. He was one of the producers and had pursued the project for seven years. The two parts were shown at Cannes in a single screening, as one piece of four hours and twenty minutes. The most striking choice is not what it covers but what it leaves out. Soderbergh never touches Guevara's childhood, the journey that became The Motorcycle Diaries, or the executions after the revolution; the film shows only the military campaign. It runs 134 minutes. Good for: the logistics of guerrilla warfare, political history, and Benicio del Toro. Less good for: the film does not criticise Guevara and says nothing about the post revolutionary executions, which is the objection raised most often. Most of the characters are indistinguishable and the plot proceeds like a military report. On its own it feels incomplete.