CANNES JOURNAL

SODERBERGH AND CHE, PROVOCATEURS

By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times, 5/23/08

On Wednesday morning festivalgoers — or at least the hordes of journalists who stumble into the Salle Lumière every day at 8:30 after a few hours’ sleep and a hasty café au lait — were given a bit of a break. In a departure, there was no competition press screening on the schedule, which provided some of us with an opportunity to glance at the trades, have a second café au lait and rest our eyes in anticipation of a long night of revolutionary struggle.

Starting at 6:30 in the evening there would be two almost simultaneous screenings of “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s nearly four-and-a-half-hour exploration of the life of Ernesto Guevara, the asthmatic Argentine doctor who became a leader of Castro’s revolution and, posthumously, a boon to the T-shirt vendors of the world.

The expectations surrounding “Che” could hardly have been higher. Mr. Soderbergh, surprise winner of the Palme d’Or in 1989 for “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” has emerged since then as one of the most protean and interesting of American filmmakers, exploring an astonishing range of genres and styles with consistent skill, intelligence and audacity. Not every movie has been great, but they have all been different. And not many directors would follow commercial froth like “Oceans Thirteen” with a digitally shot, Spanish-language epic about a Marxist militant.

In the weeks before this year’s competition slate was announced, “Che” was the center of much speculation. It was in; it was out; it wasn’t finished; it was two pictures; it was one. The version shown in the Lumière was a single movie, without opening titles or closing credits (so maybe not quite finished). There was an intermission, during which sandwiches were passed out to the hungry audience.

The halves of “Che” are mirror images. The first, though it flashes back to Guevara’s early acquaintance with Mr. Castro in Mexico and forward to his visit to New York for an appearance at the United Nations in 1964, is essentially the chronicle of a successful insurgency. It follows Mr. Castro, Guevara and their comrades from 1956 to 1959, through the stages of their war to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and it dwells less on their motives and personalities than on matters of military procedure. With impressive coherence and attention to tactical detail, Mr. Soderbergh shows how Mr. Castro’s initially tiny army fought its way down from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and ultimately routed Batista’s forces.

The second half, devoted to the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967 that ended in Guevara’s death, is equally rigorous in its depiction of a failed revolt. Though Guevara tried, in a new context, to apply the strategic lessons of the Cuban revolution — concentrate on the countryside; cultivate popular support; maintain discipline and cohesion in the ranks — everything went wrong. And it turned out that Guevara’s adversaries, the Bolivian army and its American advisers, had learned a thing or two about how to wage an effective counterinsurgency.

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in “Che,” Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro’s soulful and charismatic performance, allows Mr. Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.

But “Che” itself is interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument — about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question. The mood here among buyers has been extremely cautious, and as of this writing, distributors have balked at spending $8 million to $10 million (the reported asking price for “Che”) on a 258-minute movie to be released in two parts, with subtitles.

This is one of the frustrations of Cannes, for American critics at least. We see lots of fascinating movies — not all good, but very few completely worthless — and then wonder if we, or our readers, will ever see them again. I’m not in the movie business (a mutually beneficial arrangement, believe me), and not inclined to speculate with someone else’s money. I do hope, however, that sometime in the near future I can take part in the long and contentious conversation that “Che” deserves, and also see how my own initial ambivalence about the film resolves itself.

I have a similar hope for Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” a movie about which I am not ambivalent at all. Puzzled? Yes. Unsure of its commercial prospects? As I said, that’s none of my business. (“Synecdoche” is another competition entry looking for love in a marketplace of commitment-shy distributors.)

But Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.

But though the ideas that drive “Synecdoche, New York” are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible. These include the anxiety of artistic creation, the fear of love and the dread of its loss, and the desperate sense that your life is rushing by faster than you can make sense of it. A sad story, yes, but fittingly for a movie bristling with paradoxes and conundrums, also extremely funny.

Nothing in Mr. Kaufman’s film happens as you might expect it to, even if his previous work had conditioned you to expect surprises. Cannes, meanwhile, has a way of disappointing expectations even as it confirms them. After last year’s robust 60th-anniversary edition of the festival, which yielded so many great movies (and quite a few sales), this one feels like a bit of a letdown.

It’s not that the films are bad, but rather that many of the directors in competition have, with their previous work, set such a high standard. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with two Palmes d’Or already on their résumés, arrived this year with “Le Silence de Lorna,” an engrossing movie about the moral struggle of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. It’s very good. Not a masterpiece, though, which is what the Dardenne brothers have conditioned us to expect.

And many of us were anticipating masterpieces from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and from the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, whose second feature, “The Holy Girl,” was a discovery of the 2004 festival. Many critics insist that “Three Monkeys,” Mr. Ceylan’s new film (acquired for American release by New Yorker Films), fulfills the promise of his earlier work, which includes “Distant” and “Climates.” But in trying something new — using his austere, exacting sense of form to tell a ripely melodramatic story — he seems to have sacrificed some of the wit that made those earlier films so memorable.

Ms. Martel, in contrast, errs on the side of consistency. The obliqueness that made “The Holy Girl” so haunting feels coy and mannered in her new film, “The Headless Woman,” the point of which seems to be to pass the mental dissociation of its main character on to the audience. But if Ms. Martel is in a rut, she may be planning to break out of it. An announcement came earlier this week that her next project, “L’Eternauta,” will be a science-fiction movie involving an invasion of Earth by aliens.

If it comes to Cannes, such a radical departure will surely encounter some grumbling. How come these filmmakers can’t stick to what they’re good at? But then again: Why don’t they ever try something new? You may get the Palme d’Or, but you still can’t win. There’s no pleasing some people. Which may be why we keep coming back.