Dir. Steven Soderbergh, France/ Spain/US, 2008, 127 mins, Spanish with subtitles
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Franka Potente, Joaquim de Almeida
Review by Carol Allen
Soderbergh's two part film about Che Guevara is a bafflingly lost opportunity to explore what should have been a dramatic story revolving around a fascinating character.
Che: Part One dealt with Che's role in the Cuban revolution in the fifties. Part Two is concerned with his involvement in the failed Bolivian uprising a few years later. Like Part One, it's beautifully filmed and given an air of realism by the dialogue being in Spanish with subtitles. And we do get a bit more of the political context than we did in Part 1 in terms of a bit of Marxist chat amongst the revolutionaries and some useful scenes involving the Bolivian President. Barrientos (de Almeida) but still not enough to enable us to really understand the situation. History tells us that Barrientos's faction had overthrown the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement to get himself into power, though the movement still survived underground to emerge later after Barrientos's death. It would appear from the film that they and other local communists failed to supply the assistance Che expected for his attempted revolution, but why that was is left unexplained, while the role of the US in supporting Barrientos is so briefly dealt with you could blink and miss it. It's unlikely that Soderbergh intended this, but one is left with the impression that Barrientos has a good point when he says that the revolutionaries, who all appear to come from outside Bolivia , are just foreign terrorists out to make trouble. The Bolivian peasants, with their distinctive costume and impassive manner, don't appear to be involved in the uprising at all. Where was the indigenous movement for political change in this? The lack of it and any explanation for that weakens one's involvement with Che's group.
As far as the characters are concerned, little emerges about them and we don't really go any further into Che himself (del Toro) either. Apart from one short scene with his family and now wife, former Cuban revolutionary Aleida March (Catalina Sandino Moreno) from Part One, we learn little more about what motivates him. In fact if you haven't seen that first movie, you might wonder who he is. To get himself into Bolivia he adopts an interesting disguise, which makes him look like a badger with a receding hairline, later changing to a shaggy longhaired look after living rough in the jungle for a while. The one thing that does come over strongly is that he doesn't want anyone to know he's Che Guevara from the Cuban revolution – which brings us back to Barrientos's point.
His right-hand woman Tania (Potente) was in real life reputed to be a KGB agent, which makes her potentially an extremely interesting character. You don't get any of that from the film. She's more like an unusually athletic personal assistant. The other revolutionaries appear to be a rather jollier lot than the dour Cubans, in that there's a fair bit of laughter, hugging and comradely feeling on view. Once more there's an awful lot of trekking around the countryside and comparatively little dramatic development until the very end, after Che is captured, when a young soldier offers him a sympathetic cigarette and is a bit taken with him and we meet a Cuban officer, who hates Che, because his family was killed in the Cuban revolution. Apart from that though, dramatically it's all a bit dull.
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