Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Che: Part Two
2008 · Steven Soderbergh · Che: Part Two on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how tightly the frame crowds Guevara against terrain. (camera)
Soderbergh shoots in a narrower 1.85:1 ratio that boxes Guevara against vegetation and rock, denying him open, heroic middle distance.
Payoff: The reading calls spaces like this any-space-whatever: terrain that has lost its connective sense, geography that confuses instead of clarifying. In the reading: any-space-whatever (disconnection). The column gets lost in the frame the way it is actually lost on the ground.
Notice the exhausted greens and dust grays of the palette. (light)
Soderbergh's color runs to worn greens, ochres, and mineral grays, with faces often underexposed against the sky rather than lit for glamour.
Payoff: The washed-out color refuses the burnished, heroic look a standard war epic would give this story.
Listen for radio static that never quite connects. (sound)
Shortwave transmissions and static recur throughout, standing in for a command structure that keeps failing to reach anyone on the other end.
Payoff: The reading calls this an absolute out of field: a whole world of consequence existing just past what the camera or radio can reach. In the reading: out-of-field, absolute. You hear the silence on the other end as clearly as any line of dialogue.
Watch meetings play out like ordinary, failed negotiations. (staging)
Encounters with local party officials and peasants are staged with overlapping speech and background business, in the same undramatic register as negotiations that simply do not work.
Payoff: The film shows failure as procedure, not as a single dramatic turn, which is a harder thing to watch.
Watch del Toro's breathing and posture change scene to scene. (performance)
Del Toro plays Guevara's physical decline through the body alone, no confessional dialogue, just a man managing worsening conditions with visible effort.
Payoff: The reading calls this cinema of the body: meaning carried in tiredness and posture rather than in anything a character says. In the reading: cinema of the body. You read his condition the way you would read anyone's, by watching how they move.
Once you have seen it
Track the onscreen titles counting the shrinking column. (structure)
Dates and place names appear as the column's numbers fall, replacing any montage of accumulating victory with simple, falling arithmetic.
Payoff: The only rising action in the film is a number going down.
Watch the final cut return to the sea and the boat. (structure)
After the last events at the schoolhouse, Soderbergh cuts back to the 1956 crossing that started the whole campaign, the film's only overtly rhetorical gesture.
Payoff: The ending loops back to the beginning instead of building to a climax, offering circularity instead of triumph.
Carry this in: Watch the numbers in the titles fall; that count is the only story arc here.