Che: Part Two

Snapshot

Che: Part Two — released in some territories as Guerrilla — is the second panel of Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus diptych on Ernesto Guevara, and it is deliberately built as the inverse of the first. Where Part One traced the Cuban campaign of 1956–58 as an ascending curve toward Santa Clara, Part Two follows the Bolivian campaign of 1966–67 as an unbroken descent: a foreign column of fewer than fifty fighters, entering a country whose Communist Party will not back them, whose peasantry will not join them, and whose army — retrained with American assistance — will eventually run them to ground at the Yuro ravine. The film ends in a schoolhouse at La Higuera on 9 October 1967.

Adapted principally from Guevara's Bolivian Diary, the film is less a biography than a procedural account of a strategy failing under observation. Soderbergh shot it himself on the then-new RED One digital camera under his standing cinematography pseudonym Peter Andrews, and cut it as Mary Ann Bernard; Benicio del Toro, who had developed the project for years as star and producer, carries almost every scene. It premiered at Cannes in 2008 as a single continuous presentation of both parts, where del Toro won the Best Actor prize. Its reputation has been contested from the start — some found it inert and evasive, others read it as one of the most rigorous political films an American director has made — but its formal argument is unusually legible: revolution is presented as logistics, terrain, language and supply, and the myth is withheld.

Industry & production

The project's origins lie with del Toro and producer Laura Bickford, who pursued a Guevara film for the better part of a decade. In its earlier configuration Terrence Malick was attached to write and direct a Bolivia-set version, with Soderbergh in a producing role; Malick's departure and the project's financing difficulties left the material dormant until Soderbergh took it back and made the decisive structural choice — not one film about Bolivia, but two films, Cuba and Bolivia, made and released as a pair. Peter Buchman, who had written Part One, shares the Part Two screenplay credit with Benjamin A. van der Veen.

Crucially, this is not an American studio picture. Financing came largely from European sources — Wild Bunch in France, Spanish partners including Telecinco Cinema and Morena Films — with the two parts shot back to back as a single production. The combined budget has generally been reported in the region of the high tens of millions of dollars, though figures in circulation vary and should be treated as approximate. What is not in doubt is the commercial risk profile: a two-part, four-hour, almost entirely Spanish-language film about a Marxist guerrilla, with no studio committed to a wide domestic release.

Production did not shoot in Bolivia. Puerto Rico stood in for Cuba in Part One, and Spanish and Mexican locations carried the Bolivian material — a displacement worth naming, since the film's subject is precisely the mismatch between a revolutionary template and the specific ground it is applied to.

In the United States, IFC Films handled release. Both parts were shown together in December 2008 in a brief roadshow engagement — a single sitting with an intermission, timed for awards eligibility — before separate runs in early 2009, alongside IFC's video-on-demand distribution. The film did not perform strongly theatrically in the US; its release is now more often cited as an early data point in the migration of long, difficult, adult films toward home platforms than as a box-office story.

Technology

Che is one of the earliest major features originated on the RED One, and the film sits at a genuine hinge in the history of digital acquisition. Soderbergh had been working toward large-sensor digital for years — Full Frontal on prosumer DV, Bubble on early high-definition — and had planned Che on Panavision's Genesis before switching to RED after testing. The practical consequences shape everything visible in Part Two: a small, relatively cheap body that could be carried into dense foliage; 4K capture with enough latitude to hold detail in the blown highlights and black shadow of jungle light; long takes unconstrained by magazine length; and a shooting economy that let a director-operator work with a small crew and minimal lighting.

The choice is not incidental to the film's politics of representation. Available-light digital capture, handheld, in real terrain, produces images that decline the burnished, art-directed surface a conventional historical epic would supply. The camera behaves less like an authority and more like a participant with limited access — which is the film's epistemological position toward Guevara himself.

Technique

Cinematography

The most-discussed formal decision in the diptych is the aspect ratio split: Part One in a wide 2.35:1, Part Two in the narrower 1.85:1. The rhetorical effect is exact. Cuba is expansive — landscape, columns moving through open country, a frame with room for a movement to grow inside it. Bolivia is boxed. The narrower frame crowds Guevara against vegetation and rock, denies him the heroic middle distance, and repeatedly loses him among interchangeable figures in olive drab.

Soderbergh's palette in Part Two runs to exhausted greens, dust ochres and mineral greys, with faces often underexposed relative to sky. Long lenses flatten the guerrillas into the scrub; wide shots hold them small and unemphatic. The camera is frequently handheld but not frantic — it observes, adjusts, sometimes arrives late to an event. Where a war film would give us coverage that clarifies, Che: Part Two often gives us geography that confuses, because the column itself is lost.

Editing

Cutting under the Mary Ann Bernard credit, Soderbergh strips out the temporal scaffolding that structured Part One, where black-and-white 1964 material — the New York visit, the United Nations address — was intercut with the Sierra Maestra campaign as commentary. Part Two runs forward in one line. Its organizing device is textual: onscreen titles marking dates, place names, and the shrinking arithmetic of the column. The diary's form becomes the film's form — entries, not chapters.

The cutting is patient and elliptical between scenes but rarely showy within them. Firefights are not built into crescendos; they begin abruptly, are hard to read, and stop. There is no montage of accumulating triumph, because there is nothing accumulating. The film's most audacious cut is its last: after the killing, a return to the sea and the Granma, the 1956 crossing that began everything — the only moment where Soderbergh permits himself an overtly rhetorical gesture, and it is a gesture of circularity rather than apotheosis.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Soderbergh operating his own camera produces a staging logic closer to documentary reportage than to blocking-for-coverage. Scenes are frequently played in depth, with overlapping speech, background business, and dialogue that continues while attention has moved elsewhere. Meetings — with the Bolivian Communist Party's Mario Monje, with peasants who will not commit, with the French intellectual Régis Debray and the Argentine Ciro Bustos before their arrest — are staged as negotiations that fail in the ordinary, undramatic register of negotiations failing.

The film's recurring physical motifs are unglamorous and cumulative: rations and their absence, boots, radio equipment that will not reach Havana, river crossings, asthma medication. The schoolhouse at La Higuera is small, bare, and shot without ceremony. The parallel staging of the Bolivian Rangers being trained by American advisers is presented with the same procedural neutrality as the guerrilla column's own drilling — two systems of preparation, one of which is being resupplied.

Sound

Alberto Iglesias's score, already sparing in Part One, nearly withdraws here. Long stretches carry only location ambience: insects, water, wind through dry brush, the friction of movement. Radio static and shortwave transmissions do much of the film's expository work and also its emotional work — the sound of a command structure failing to connect. Gunfire arrives without musical preparation and is mixed for suddenness and confusion rather than impact-per-shot. Larry Blake, Soderbergh's longtime sound collaborator, supervises a track whose principal effect is to leave events unnarrated. The silence around the execution is the film's loudest choice.

Performance

Del Toro's work across the diptych is essentially a study in subtraction. The commander of Part One — confident, pedagogical, physically capable — is progressively dismantled: wheezing, dysenteric, in visibly deteriorating health, increasingly dependent on others to move him through terrain he cannot manage. The performance withholds interiority almost entirely. There is no confessional aria, no scene in which Guevara explains himself; what we get instead is behavior under worsening conditions, and an authority that persists as habit after the conditions that produced it have gone.

The ensemble is drawn largely from Spanish-language cinema — among them Franka Potente as Tania, Lou Diamond Phillips as Monje, Joaquim de Almeida as President Barrientos, Carlos Bardem, Jordi Mollà, and Demián Bichir returning as Fidel Castro to read Guevara's farewell letter in the opening. Matt Damon appears in a brief, deliberately unstarry cameo as a priest. The casting strategy consistently refuses the star-wattage gradient that biopics normally use to tell us who matters.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is an anti-biopic in the strict sense: it declines origin, psychology, and interpretive summary. It also declines the connective tissue between its two panels — the years 1959 to 1965, Guevara's role in the consolidation of the Cuban state, the revolutionary tribunals, the ministry, the Congo — which is the single most consequential structural omission in the work and the source of most of the political criticism aimed at it.

What remains is process. Soderbergh's stated interest was in how a revolution is actually conducted, and Part Two is best read as a controlled experiment: the same man, the same method, different ground. The dramatic mode is closer to a case study than a tragedy, and the film withholds the consolations of tragedy — no recognition scene, no articulated reckoning. The result is a narrative that many viewers experience as flat by design, in which the only rising action is the descending count of surviving fighters.

Genre & cycle

It sits at the intersection of the political epic, the war film, and the last-stand narrative, while refusing the pleasures of each. Its nearest generic relatives are the guerrilla-warfare film and the doomed-expedition film; the jungle attrition, the shrinking column and the leader whose authority outlasts his viability invite comparison with Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, though as resonance rather than demonstrable influence.

In cycle terms, Che belongs to a mid-2000s return of politically explicit filmmaking in and around Hollywood — a period marked by the theatrical revival and much-noted institutional interest in The Battle of Algiers, and by the Iraq-era appetite for films about insurgency and empire. It also follows Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which had made a marketable young Guevara out of the pre-revolutionary journals; Soderbergh's film is in part a corrective to that reception, and a direct rebuke to the older Hollywood precedent, Richard Fleischer's Che! (1969), with Omar Sharif in the role. Contemporaneously, Jean-François Richet's two-part Mesrine (2008) suggests a wider moment of split-release biographical filmmaking.

Authorship & method

Che: Part Two is close to a limit case of Soderbergh's do-it-yourself auteurism: he directs, shoots (as Peter Andrews) and edits (as Mary Ann Bernard), compressing the production chain to a degree that makes the film's rough, reactive texture achievable at all. The pseudonyms — drawn from his father's name and his mother's maiden name — are a long-running joke that also describes a real working method, in which the camera operator can change the plan mid-take because he is also the director.

The key collaborators are correspondingly few and load-bearing: Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen on the screenplay, working from the Bolivian Diary; Alberto Iglesias, whose sparse score is defined mostly by where it refuses to go; Larry Blake on sound; the Spanish production design team led by Antxón Gómez, whose work is notable for its refusal of period lustre; and del Toro, whose function as originating producer and sole continuous presence makes him a co-author in practice.

Soderbergh's method here is the one he had been developing since The Limey and Bubble: choose a formal constraint, apply it without exception, and let the constraint generate the meaning. In Part Two, the constraints are chronology, the narrow frame, the diary, and the withholding of interiority.

Movement / national cinema

Nationally, the film is a hybrid that resists tidy placement. Its director is American and its lineage runs through American independent cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s; its money, its production base and much of its craft personnel are Spanish and French; its language is Spanish; its subject is Latin American. It is best understood as a product of the transnational European art-film economy that sustained ambitious auteur projects the American studio system had stopped financing.

Its relationship to Latin American cinema is real but oblique. It draws on the tradition of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Cuban filmmaking and on the broader Third Cinema legacy — Solanas and Getino's polemics, Santiago Álvarez's newsreel practice, Gutiérrez Alea's ambivalent portraits of revolutionary consciousness — without belonging to it. The film's own displacement (Bolivia played by Spain and Mexico; Guevara's Bolivian campaign filmed away from Bolivia) reproduces, perhaps unintentionally, the outsider's problem it dramatizes.

Era / period

Two eras are in play. The depicted period — 1966–67 — is the moment when foquismo, the theory that a small armed nucleus could catalyze revolutionary conditions rather than wait for them, met its most public refutation. The film is a near-clinical anatomy of that refutation: the vanguard arrives, the conditions do not follow, the peasantry informs rather than enlists, the local party withholds support, and the counterinsurgency apparatus — including American advisers and the Cuban-American CIA operative Félix Rodríguez, present at the end — closes the ring.

The period of production is equally legible. 2008 is the year digital origination became viable for large-scale features, the year the American mid-budget adult drama entered visible decline, and a year in which video-on-demand release began to look like a serious alternative rather than a consolation. It is also a moment saturated with Guevara as commodity — the Korda photograph reproduced to the point of semantic exhaustion — against which the film's refusal to supply an icon reads as a deliberate act.

Themes

The untransferability of a model. The film's central proposition is comparative: what worked in the Sierra Maestra does not work in Ñancahuazú, and the reasons are material — terrain, supply lines, peasant land tenure, the posture of the local party, the presence of an army being retrained by a superpower.

Language and illegibility. The column cannot speak the languages of the people it means to liberate; the encounters with campesinos are staged as failures of communication before they are failures of politics. Correspondingly, the film denies the viewer access to Guevara's interior, offering a diary's dates without a diary's confession.

The body as argument. Asthma, dysentery, injury, hunger and exhaustion are not local color but the film's material substrate. The revolutionary will is shown wearing out a body in real time, and the degradation is presented as information rather than pathos.

Failure as subject. Most political cinema narrates either victory or martyrdom. Soderbergh narrates a defeat that never resolves into either, and refuses the redemptive turn at the moment the genre most expects it.

Icon versus process. By withholding the poster image, the film asks what remains of Guevara when the myth's machinery is switched off — and answers, with some severity, that what remains is a plan and its execution.

Reception, canon & influence

Reception was and remains divided, along a fault line that is as much about tolerance for formal austerity as about politics. The Cannes premiere — both parts in one sitting — produced immediate and polarized reactions; del Toro's Best Actor prize was the clear consensus. Sympathetic critics, including several of the most serious American reviewers of the period, treated the diptych as a rigorous attempt to film history as process, and a number of them found Part Two the stronger, harder film. Detractors found it long, affectless and dramatically inert, and a substantial line of criticism attacked the omission of the 1959–65 years as an evasion that lets the myth stand by not examining what Guevara did in power. That objection is the film's most durable liability, and it is a fair one to state plainly: the film's silence there is a choice, not an oversight, and it is the choice most responsible for the charge of hagiography-by-omission.

Commercially, the American release was not a success; its afterlife has been on home formats and in repertory, and the diptych is now most often seen — correctly — as a single work.

Backward: what fed it. The lineage runs through Pontecorvo, whose The Battle of Algiers remains the founding text for procedural insurgency filmmaking and whose Burn! addresses revolution as an exportable technology; through Rossellini's late historical films, with their pedagogical, anti-dramatic reconstruction of process; through the Cuban and Third Cinema traditions; and through Costa-Gavras's political thrillers as the commercial form Soderbergh declines. The immediate textual sources are Guevara's own writings — the Bolivian Diary for this part, the Reminiscences for the first. Within Soderbergh's own filmography the antecedents are his formal experiments — The Limey, Full Frontal, Bubble, Solaris — and Traffic as the precedent for multilingual, geographically dispersed political storytelling.

Forward: what it shaped. Its clearest technological legacy is as an early, high-visibility proof that a large-format digital camera could carry a serious feature, accelerating a transition Soderbergh then pursued relentlessly himself — The Girlfriend Experience, the studio thrillers of the 2010s, and eventually the iPhone-shot Unsane and High Flying Bird — while retaining the shooting-and-cutting-it-himself model that Che proved viable at scale.

Formally, it stands with Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010) as the defining example of the long-form, multilingual, procedural political portrait released in both theatrical and segmented form — a shape that became far more common as streaming normalized the five-hour object. Its anti-biopic stance anticipates the decade's fashion for biographical films that decline biography, from Larraín's political portraits to the broader move away from cradle-to-grave structure. And its release pattern — roadshow presentation, split parts, early video-on-demand — reads now as a rehearsal for distribution arrangements that became standard within a decade.

Where the record is thin is on the film's direct influence claims: few filmmakers have publicly cited it as a model, and its impact is better described as convergent and infrastructural than as a school. What is not thin is its standing as an argument — that the most radical thing an American director could do with the most reproduced image of the twentieth century was to film the man's last year as work, and let it fail.