A Whole Lot of Che

The Film Everyone's Talking About (Part One)

15.05.08 / Getting attention in Cannes can be hard — even dangerous — work. At last year's festival, Jerry Seinfeld was required to dress up like a bee and "fly" off the roof of the Carlton Hotel. This year's festival opened with Jack Black Kung Fu fighting a whole boatload of panda impersonators.It's a trickier business to grab headlines before the festival begins, but that's just what Stephen Soderbergh managed to do this time around. Everybody was laying bets on whether the American director would finish editing his Che Guevara epic in time for the film to be included in this year's Cannes competition. Soderbergh screened a mere 10 minutes of the film back in February at the Berlin Film Festival, but that proved to be enough to fuel the buzz machine ("a modern classic in the making...") and get the distributors lining up.Wild Bunch, the company backing Soderbergh's film, has reason to feel optimistic, given that the Che film has drawn comparisons (highly speculative though they may be) to Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, and Apocalypse Now. And Wild Bunch has even more reason to feel relieved, considering that Soderbergh made it into the official Cannes lineup just under the wire.In case anyone was worried that Soderbergh would treat his Cannes audience to only another 10 minutes of footage, the latest cut of Che runs 4 hours and 28 minutes and is divided into two parts (The Argentine and Guerilla). The official screening — of the entire opus — is set for Wednesday, May 21st. So everyone will just have to find something else to talk about until then. — R.K.