Controversy at Cannes: The Headless Woman

To my mind, Soderbergh’s film is neither/nor, perhaps a bit of both, and nothing if not the movie of the year — the one audiences and critics alike seem certain to be digesting and arguing about well into Oscar season (provided, of course, they get a chance to see it). As counterintuitive a bio-pic as I’m Not There, but lacking any easily marketable gimmicks, this two-part collection of scenes from the life of the iconic Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Guevara is as notable for what it manages to include in its four-and-a-half-hour running time as for its structuring absences — namely, all but a few fleeting glimpses of Guevara’s personal life, plus the entire six-year stretch between the end of the Cuban revolution and the start of Che’s ill-fated campaign to direct a sequel in Bolivia.

Simply put, Che is a movie — or two movies — after Guevara’s own heart, in which the rebel leader often recedes into the jungle scape, one more proletariat cog in the Marxist wheel, while the greater cause (represented by long scenes of ideological debate and battlefield strategy) comes to the fore. One part ends in conditional triumph, the other in tragedy; in both, Soderbergh, per Che’s prophetic words, suggests that a revolution succeeds or fails by the will of the people. This is, as my colleague J. Hoberman has already remarked in The Village Voice, resolutely uncommercial stuff. But no matter what you think of Che, it’s hard not to admire Soderbergh for following up the trifecta jackpot of Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen with a movie about violent political upheaval intended for an audience that, at the box office and the polling place, routinely shows its preference for the status quo.

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Mind games: Lucrecia Martel's Headless Woman

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

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Is there any plausible scenario by which a 258-minute, Spanish-language Che could have come to Cannes and become the belle of the ball? Or sold to a North American distributor for the $8 to $10 million reportedly being asked by Che’s international sales broker, Wild Bunch? Probably not. What’s disturbing, however, is the number of highly intelligent critics and festival programmers who seemed to take Soderbergh’s — and Martel’s and Kaufman’s — subversion of their expectations as something of a personal affront, and who seemed to crave something altogether more conventional. Less Che, more Ray.

It’s one thing to fault a movie for what it is, or what it sets out to do and falls short of, but at Cannes, many of Che’s most vocal opponents (there were also a few passionate champions) chastised Soderbergh for not making the movie(s) they wanted to see, instead of grappling with the one(s) that he did. Would Che be improved by some discreet trimming, especially in the first half? Probably. Would it be a more successful artistic achievement if it were a single, three-hour film featuring more scenes of Che at home with the wife and kids, or powwowing with Castro down at La Cabaña? I sincerely doubt it.

But even as I write this, five days after seeing Che in its entirety and one day after returning to see the second half again, I am still turning the movie over in my mind — a luxury fewer and fewer critics are able to enjoy in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. The aforementioned Variety review of Che went live on the Internet mere hours after the conclusion of the press screening. In an even more extreme case of jockeying for position, the internet film critic Eric Kohn decided to “live blog” the first Cannes screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — a stream of incoherent plot spoilers and thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgments (“Shia and Cate in a sword fight. Two cars driving side by side. Whoa.”) that the heretofore respectable Web site Indiewire.com sullied itself by publishing. that Indiewire.com editor Eugene Hernandez lent undue credence by publishing on his blog. *

As it happens, my bedside reading during Cannes this year included I Peed On Fellini, a wonderful new memoir by the Australian film critic and former Sydney Film Festival director David Stratton. In one chapter, Stratton reminisces about his friendship with Variety’s late, legendary Paris-based film critic Gene Moskowitz, who, in the 1960s and ’70s would file reviews from Cannes by typing them on a manual typewriter and air-mailing them to New York, where, several weeks later, they would finally appear in print. Technologically speaking, we’ve come a long way since then, but I wonder if the movies — and movie criticism — are any better for it.

Amazingly, Che wasn’t the only five-hour pseudo-bio-pic to premiere in Cannes this year. Down the Croisette at the breakaway Directors’ Fortnight fest, Filipino director Raya Martin’s Warholian Now Showing devoted even more screen time (291 minutes) to its chronicle of a Manila girl’s evolution from adolescence into adulthood. Shooting in low-grade video, with a visible tracking problem on the screen for much of the duration, Martin observes his main character (played, at two different ages, by two different actresses) playing hopscotch in the street, lying on a bed, listening to the radio and working a part-time job in a mall DVD shop (where, in a nice bit of kismet, one of her co-workers sports a Che T-shirt). The more mundane the action, the longer Martin is likely to hold on it — a single shot in Now Showing may last for as long as 10 or 20 minutes. This film is probably better suited to gallery spaces than traditional cinemas. In Cannes, where the vectors of art-movie minimalism and Hollywood maximalism collide, a single screening of a movie like this onecan seem like a willful act of defiance: Take that, Indiana Jones!