Just heard from a friend who’s at Cannes and saw Che, the epic film biography of the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

As my friend said, “It’s no Ocean’s Eleven type  light-hearted movie.” He’s not kidding. The two-part saga runs four hours, 30 minutes, with an intermission and is almost entirely in Spanish. It’s also shot digitally. But then maybe only someone like Soderbergh, who won the Palme d’Or back in ’89 for Sex, Lies and Videotape, would follow up the frothy success of  Ocean’s Thirteen with a serious look at an asthmatic Marxist revolutionary.

It stars Benicio Del Toro, the Oscar-winning co-star of Soderbergh’s Traffic, as Guevara,  and the two films are titled The Argentine and Guerrilla. Matt Damon, one of the stars of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, also appears. The director gave a press conference about the film and smartly defended both his choice of language - “You can’t make a film with any level of credibility in this case unless it’s in Spanish,” he noted, and the film’s length and format -  “I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you upset people if something’s not conventional.” My friend said it also played without any credits at all – either at the start or end of the film. Whatever the reaction in the U.S., it’s got to be one of the more interesting and provocative films to surface this year, cementing Soderbergh’s rep as one of the most versatile directors in the world.

Share This

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.