Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ gets slammed, praised at Cannes
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A rough, uncut version of Steven Soderbergh’s highly anticipated movie about legendary Argentine revolutionary and guerrilla fighter Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (see IMDB listing here) divided critics at Cannes this week.
Some critics faulted the film, which runs more than four hours, for not having a subplot, and complained that the Commandante appears diminished, if anything, by Soderbergh’s interpretation.
‘No doubt it will be back to the drawing board for ‘Che,’ Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. 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 heâs portrayed here. ... Neither half feels remotely like a satisfying stand-alone film, while the whole offers far too many aggravations for its paltry rewards.’ Todd McCarthy, Variety.
Read the Los Angeles Times report here and BBC Mundo’s for Spanish language.
Update: A.O. Scott of the New York Times had kinder, if qualified, words for the film.
WireImage.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City