Comparing Steven Soderbergh’s Che with Olivier Assayas’s Carlos is an interesting task. Both films have violent, charismatic central figures. Both characters have been labeled “dangerous revolutionaries” by the United States, and both films deal heavily with guerilla warfare and terrorism. Holding these films up against one another exposes the contrasting elements of both the films and their central characters.
To begin with: Carlos, released this past year to generally favorable reviews. The 330-minute sprawling epic tells the story of a delusional terrorist-for-hire. Carlos (aka ‘Carlos the Jackal’) is a man supposedly full of noble ideas and high-minded convictions. The film begins by showing his involvement in the PLPF (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), fighting admirably for the cause of an oppressed people. He talks in cafés, shouts political rhetoric, and asserts, “Behind every bullet, there is an idea.” As the film continues, we see his convictions waver in the face of danger and find him acting on his own behalf as he jumps from cause to cause. His high-mindedness devolves into a kind of self-serving madness of tragic proportions.
Carlos’s few successful acts of political terrorism lead him to believe in his own self-constructed hype. More often than not, his operations fail miserably. When he’s forced to make decisions for himself, he acts selfishly and allows his operations to fail. All throughout the film he claims that there’s a “high price” on his head. Even when the CIA has deemed him merely a “historical curiosity,” he maintains his statements about his dominance over global terrorism.
Assayas’s treatment of the material is fitting. Though the film is 5 hours long, the pace never slackens. Audiences are sucked into the psychosexual, delusional vortex that Carlos has created for himself. The film contains much more action than exposition, just as Carlos the man was much more inclined to act than to explain. We see him bomb buildings, take hostages, have affairs, expound empty rhetoric, and eventually become cripplingly paranoid.
Assayas heavily sexualizes weapons in violence in painting his psychotic portrait of this notorious terrorist. In one of the most stirring scenes, Carlos forces his mate to sexually suck on the pin of a grenade while he moves his pistol up and down her thigh. He’s a sexually self conscious person, and Assayas often shows him examining his naked body in the mirror or lamenting his degenerating physical condition. Towards the end of the film, he becomes incapacitated for a few days because of undergoing liposuction surgery. His eventual demise is largely aided because he’s forced to have testicular surgery. Here he is emasculated and ill, and that is when the French authorities swoop in and arrest him for his various crimes.
Carlos is a tragic figure for a few reasons. First, his delusional self-importance is almost hard to watch. His conviction that he’s a force to be reckoned with in the world feeds his paranoia. This directly corresponds to his own conception of his fate. He mentions multiple times throughout the film that he firmly believes that he will die at the hand of a political assassin. He arrogantly asserts that somebody will finally cash in for the “high price” that’s been put on his head. His demise doesn’t end in death, but arrest. To this day he wallows in a French prison, unable to fulfill his self-conceptualized tragic destiny.
Carlos is, on the surface, an action film. There are chase scenes, explosions, graphic sexual moments, fast-paced editing, and numerous gunfights. Underneath the surface, however, lies a historical character study of one of the most intriguing figures of geopolitical terrorism the world has ever seen.
In contrast to Carlos, Che deals with a man who holds his convictions firmly. He never wavers in his belief in a collective struggle wherever the dominant force of imperialism oppresses those who are less powerful. Where Carlos’s downfall came from his self-serving, paranoid delusions of grandeur, Guevara’s seemingly comes from his strict adherence to his cause and convictions.
Steven Soderbergh’s Che is a film that can be defined for what it’s not. It isn’t a biopic, it’s not a psychological study, it doesn’t attempt to explain any of Che’s motivations for his actions, it doesn’t martyr him as a hero or a champion, and it isn’t aesthetically formed like a traditional war film. Che is a presentation of events in the life of a man who believed passionately in a cause. It chronicles those events in an attempt to humanize an icon.
The first of the two parts are framed through an interview and a UN address in 1964. This was when Guevara was riding at the height of his iconic image, and allows for Soderbergh to overtly insert some of Che’s political thoughts and ideas. This 1964 portion of the film is all shot in black and white, 16mm film, and offers up the only close-ups of Che that we see in the entire first film. An interviewer asks “What is the most important quality for a revolutionary to posses?” After a brief pause, Che replies “Love. Love of humanity.” This reveals the essence of the film, a portrait of a flawed man who loves humanity and is willing to fight for that love.
The first film The Argentine is the more conventional of the two. Formally, Soderbergh refused to use any hand-held camera techniques. While not conforming to the aesthetic norms of most Hollywood war films, it visually reads much more smoothly than the second part The Guerilla, which is shot exclusively hand-held.
Where The Argentine follows the success of a revolution-of-love, The Guerilla chronicles Che’s demise in a foreign land. More frightening than its companion, The Guerilla adopts tragic proportions. Guevara is in Bolivia, trying to organize a band of guerilla fighters to overthrow their current military dictatorship. Issues of national identity arise, as Guevara and his soldiers are not Bolivian. He finds his operations going awry, the army foiling his plans, and his refusal to abandon the cause ultimately ends in his capture and execution. Where Carlos assumes tragedy through his inability to carry out his self-defined fate, Che embodies tragedy through his stubborn belief in a doomed revolution.
Unlike Carlos, the mood and pace of both parts of Che is much more meditative. Rather than fast-paced action over any sort of exposition, there is intense focus on the principles behind Guevara’s revolutionary violence. There are many shots of Che reading, writing, talking, and thinking as opposed to the constant, violent, sexual desire that Assayas encapsulates with Carlos.
There’s much to be gained from looking at these films side-by-side. While the central figures aren’t exactly the same, it’s worth it to take a look at how different filmmakers handle the idea of the violent, international figure. Assayas dabbles in psychoanalysis in an adrenaline-fueled attempt at explaining and understanding Carlos. Soderbergh opts for a more meditative relation of a story – an attempt to somewhat humanize Che’s iconic image and allow his story to assume tragic proportions.
The two films are important studies on how modern cinema portrays violent, global, iconic revolutionaries. It seems as if cinema has taken a step away from revering such figures, and is now more interested in humanizing them (whether that be through psychosexual explanation or historical presentation). In an era wrought with political unrest and rebellious uprisings, Carlos and Che ring with and aura of profundity, begging us to humanize the larger-than-life characters that occupy our current geo-political landscape.
Sam Flancher
