Cannes. Che.

"Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity," writes Glenn Kenny at indieWIRE.

"The two parts of Che treat two discrete periods in Ernesto Guevara's life: his participation in the Cuban revolution of 1957 - 59, wherein he was Fidel Castro's second in overthrowing the tyrannical Batista regime is depicted in Guerilla; his dreadfully abortive attempt to spread Latin American revolution in Bolivia from 1966 to 1967 in the subject of The Argentine. This structure very conveniently elides the period wherein Che, as effective co-head of Castro's Cuban government, presided over mass executions, the persecution of homosexuals, the ruination of the island's economy, the ill-fated alliance with the Soviet Union, and so on."

"There will be arguments about the politics of the films; there will be discussions of whether or not the films have any emotional center," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "There will be talk of if Benicio Del Toro deserves a Best Actor nomination for his work as Guevara, or if Soderbergh's portrait of Che is too flat to engage us; I can easily imagine discussions of the look and feel of the film, shot in high-resolution digital with all the craft and care Soderbergh usually brings to shooting on film. I can't predict how all of these questions and possibilities will play out, but I can say - and will say - what a rare pleasure it is to have a film (or films) that, in our box-office obsessed, event-movie, Oscar-craving age, is actually worth talking about on so many levels."

"In the 20 years since he won the Palme D'Or for sex, lies and videotape, Steven Soderbergh has travelled along some unexpected paths from the demented experimentation of Schizopolis and the sterile 1940s homage of The Good German to several helpings of Danny Ocean and his merry men to top up his commercial credibility," writes Allan Hunter in Screen Daily. "It is hard to imagine another American director of his generation with the clout or all-round ability to pull off a two-film, five-hour portrait of revolutionary icon Ernesto Che Guevara. His measured approach eschews grand, crowd-pleasing gestures or any temptation to adopt the sweep of a David Lean-style epic. Instead, he has created an absorbing, thoughtful marathon in which the focus is firmly on the personalities and the political arguments that forged the revolutionary ideals of the 1950s and 1960s.... This is very much a film of ideas."

"If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed here," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Che is too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it's got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time also forces comparison to such rare works as Lawrence of Arabia, Reds and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, Che doesn't feel epic - just long."

Updates: "What does it say about people who see a film like this and go 'meh'? asks Jeffrey Wells. "You can't watch a live-wire film like Che and say 'give me more.' It is what it is, and it gives you plenty. Take no notice of anyone who says it doesn't."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez and Variety's Anne Thompson have pix and quotes from the press conference.

For the Los Angeles Times, Pete Hammond describes the ordeal of waiting to get into the screening - only to see crowds thin considerably in the intermission. At any rate, he has an idea for the marketing people.

"The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d'or," announces the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, for whom Che is "virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role. Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first - and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last."

"Whether it's one movie or two, Che clearly isn't finished," blogs Salon's Andrew O'Hehir:

It was shown here with no opening or closing credits, only a few crude digital intertitles ("NEW YORK 1964") that looked as if they'd been slapped on an hour earlier. As with seemingly every movie in this Year of Mixed Emotions at Cannes, reactions to the screening were all over the map; nobody in the group of critics I ate dinner with was entirely sure what he or she thought.

The Cannes Che, probably a film no one will see again, is a big, sprawling, ambitious mess. It's less a grand-opera mess than a beautifully constructed machine whose parts don't all quite work together. I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.

"There's a lot more struggle and tension in Che 2, which gives the film more narrative thrust, and also more political context so you're not locked into the claustrophobia of the Bolivian jungle," blogs the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik. "Still, the film is difficult, episodic and willfully disgregarding of what the director calls 'movie moments.'"

"It's not only an entirely serious and adult film - indeed, it is best regarded as an art movie - but it's also an extraordinary movie from an American director," writes Geoff Andrew for Time Out. "This, in the end, is a film about the Revolution as work, as process, as struggle, rather than a sentimental celebration of one individual."

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"For all of its length and action, the film is strangely under-dramatized, and you don't know that much more about Che coming out of the film than going into it," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"This is Soderbergh's most avant-garde picture, and although there are already calls for re-editing - the first half, in particular, throws an enormous amount of nonchronological information in the audience's lap - the Cannes version deserves to be preserved; to cut the movie would diminish the sense of Soderbergh's sheer obsession with the material," blogs Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago. "It is a fair criticism that the movie unduly elides, among other things, the brutal injustices that Che committed in Castro's government, even if they aren't in a period covered by the film. The source of Soderbergh's interest appears to be exclusively in the nuts and bolts of guerrilla revolution - educating civilians, recruiting soldiers, finding food, cooking a pig and so on. If focusing so relentlessly on apparent minutiae can sometimes be alienating, it's also what makes the movie such an attention-grabber."

"The impulse is unimpeachably admirable; the result is heartbreakingly misguided," writes Stephen Garrett for Esquire. "Why try to avoid passing judgment? Why pretend that you haven't anyway?... There's no need for character assassination here. But the absence of darker, more contradictory revelations of his nature leaves Che bereft of complexity. All that remains is a South American superman: uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring."

"[T]he running time is not the problem of this honorable, doomed effort; it's that so many scenes are repetitions of earlier ones," argues Time's Richard Corliss. "But the major burden falls on its star, who as one of the producers has nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro - whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof - is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one thrilling confrontation at the UN between Guevara and ambassadors from other Latin American countries, Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma."

For the New York Times' AO Scott, the film has "some big problems as well as major virtues." It's "interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument - about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question."

Updates, 5/23: "Che is a highly impressive achievement," writes Patrick Z McGavin at Stop Smiling. "It delivers on several different levels, frequently subverting classical drama or storytelling. It relates only fragments of a complicated life, but the director expertly collates these incidents and dramatic episodes in connoting a larger portrait. Soderbergh produced Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan work, I'm Not There, and both filmmakers express an obstinate refusal in going against the grain. Like I'm Not There, Che is a fundamentally expressive and elective piece on subjective forms and contentious lives."

"The battle sequences, like the rest of the film shot by Soderbergh himself on the new digital RED camera, are exhilarating; the brothers-at-arms camaraderie is engaging," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "But it’s a very uncritical portrait of Guevara who presides, Solomon-like, over the petty squabbles and misbehaviour of guerrillas who shuffle like guilty schoolboys in his presence."

Che "may well be the most fastidious and exhaustive anatomy of revolutionary politics since The Battle of Algiers," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Neither hagiography nor lightweight biopic, Che is a brave and gorgeously photographed film whose seriousness and captivating story offer a cinematic experience beyond the extraordinary."

"[T]he latter half is really where it's at," writes Alison Willmore. The Argentine may be "ust an exceptionally long, background-laden prologue to "Guerrilla," which is linear, less efficient, more poetic and unhappy."

"Regardless of your political views, I bet most people will be disappointed to find that Soderbergh hasn't put together a more balanced view of the controversial leader," writes Charlie Prince at Cinema Strikes Back. "And with a 4.5 hour running time, the director certainly can't complain that he didn't have enough time to do it."

Che "may be a great movie, but it is also something just as rare - a magnificently uncommercial folly," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "This skillfully didactic, nervily dialectical, feel-good, feel-bad combat film has less in common with The Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871) or even a structuralist extravaganza like Michael Snow's La Région Centrale. Che is a thing to be experienced."

Update, 5/29: "Simply put, Che is a movie - or two movies - after Guevara's own heart, in which the rebel leader often recedes into the jungle scape, one more proletariat cog in the Marxist wheel, while the greater cause (represented by long scenes of ideological debate and battlefield strategy) comes to the fore," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "One part ends in conditional triumph, the other in tragedy; in both, Soderbergh, per Che's prophetic words, suggests that a revolution succeeds or fails by the will of the people."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2008 2:12 AM