Jean-Paul Sartre called him "the most complete human being of our age". The Guerrillero Heroico photo of his stern visage is the most-reproduced print in the history of photography. And also the clearest sign of disagreement with authority whenever it appears on t-shirts and badges, or as tattoos.

The Argentinian doctor, diplomat and fighter Ernesto Guevara, commonly known as Che, is an icon of counter-culture today as much as he was an icon of the global revolution (whatever that means) when he was alive.

Steven Soderbergh makes the attempt to paint the picture of the mortal behind the icons in his two-movie portrait – Che: Part one – The Argentine and Che: Part two – Guerrilla. The Bulgarian distributors decided to screen the two with a break of several weeks in between, which is a loss both for the film and the extreme connoisseurs among cinema lovers, who are the real (if not the only) audience of this film.

Soderbergh wants to be the modern-day François Truffaut. He wants to do films for his own enjoyment (Traffic) and the occasional commercial movie (Ocean’s Eleven). His biopic diptych about Che Guevara’s life is an extreme example of the former.

The storytelling is objectivist and almost documentary-like, the style is a cold cinéma vérité – Soderbergh sat behind the camera and did the editing himself. The tone is evangelical, similar to the Christian gospels that retell Christ’s life as a long line of moralising fables, worshipping from afar but emotionless. Guevara’s deeds are left to speak for themselves.

The two films tell the story of two military campaigns: the first is his own "entrance into Jerusalem" (or in this case, Havana on January1 1959); the second is the tragic attempt to export the revolution to Bolivia (1967) and must certainly be the "road to Golgotha".

In The Argentine, Che (Benicio Del Toro, who received the best actor award at the Cannes festival in 2008 for his portrayal of Guevara) ensures the victory of the revolution in Cuba through toil, sweat, ambushes and deaths in the jungle, while Castro (Demián Bichir) is the ideological leader and standard of the revolution. The film feels like a real time story, the voiceover text drawn from Guevara’s own diaries.

Much like his implacable hero and just as revolutionary, Soderbergh would not employ any means to shed light on the protagonist’s past, nor any dialogue that would shed more light on the action, beyond what is seen on the screen.

We never quite get under Che’s skin since Soderbergh swore not to use any close-ups of his hero in the key moments of the film. His explanation was that it would have been against Che Guevara’s belief in equality. Even Pier Paolo Pasolini in his proletarian Gospel According to St Matthew gave Christ (played by an amateur actor, no less) the right to one close-up during the dramatic "why have you forsaken me?" moment. In Che, the man is completely overshadowed by the revolutionary.

When a journalist in New York (Julia Ormond) asks him what is the most important quality for a revolutionary, Che answers "love of humanity". And really believes it.

Kapital Light, issue 32