Clandestine in Bolivia: Che Part Two

To enter Bolivia clandestinely, Ernesto “Che” Guevara disguises himself. Bald up top, with graying sides, dark-rimmed glasses and buckteeth. Castro tells him he looks like his father. The way this transformation plays in Che Part Two, which leaps across the eight years between Part One’s victory in Havana and the campaign that would end Guevara’s life, emphasizes how notoriety can thwart the real work of a revolutionary. (This doubtlessly resonates with actors like Benicio Del Toro, who endeavour to shape-shift so as to better embody that elusive autonomous character, or directors like Steven Soderbergh, who endeavour to make films so wildly diverse so as to sidestep expectation.) It also underlines the gulf between the careers of Guevara and Castro, still alive today, a robust anachronism in modern politics. In any case, long before the proliferation of T-shirts and mindless idolatry, Guevara was already in some sense attempting to foil fame as a means of following his vocation.

After the divergent results of the two campaigns they dramatize, the most striking difference between Che Part One and Two is their level of immersion into the business of developing an armed uprising. Part Two gets us into Bolivia relatively quickly and from there seldom maneuvers away from Guevara’s arduous trajectory, to which the camera doggedly sticks. There are far too many idiosyncratic flourishes and too much historical selection to call Soderbergh’s approach faux documentary, but there is the sense of the documentarian’s commitment to watching a process unfold. It can be grueling to watch, and sometimes confusing. Like The Thin Red Line, the films of Hungarian director Miklós Janscó, and perhaps Apocalypse Now, it joins the tiny league of war movies you could call hypnotic. And this tells you the strange—and I think utterly fascinating—place where Che lives. It feeds you waves of historical data, builds incredible tension, and puts you in a trance all at once.

There’s a fireside discussion where Mario Monje, leader of Bolivia’s Communist Party, suggests that Guevara will fail because Bolivians don’t want a foreigner for a savior. Someone counters with the fact that Bolivia isn’t even named after a Bolivian—Simón Bolívar was Venezuelan. But the disconnect between such sly arguments and the reality of popular sentiment looms large over Guevara’s Bolivian campaign. It’s simplistic, but maybe there’s something to the notion that Cuba was simply desperate enough, and the Bolivians not quite, or if so, perhaps their hunger was of a more particular nature. While carefully placing such discussions at the forefront, neither Soderbergh’s direction nor Del Toro’s largely stoic performance overtly support any one reading, but their evocation of the star-crossed atmosphere and litany of struggles surrounding the fiasco is haunting.

It’s been 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, yet its legacy, like that of its protagonists, remains no less fraught, no easier to assess. The final images of Che Part Two return us to where Part One began, with Guevara, clean-shaven, with triumph still far ahead, leaning on the rail of that leaky little boat with its 82 men. Guevara says nothing in this sequence, but glances over toward Castro, who stands confidently near the bow. There is a quality about Guevara’s stare that’s hard to guess at, a flicker of something. It could be suspicion.