Movies tend to romanticize revolution. Steven Soderbergh, left, with Benicio Del Toro, center, the star of “Che.”/TERESA ISASI

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY


“We only won the war,” Commandante Ernesto Guevara says a couple of hours into the movie that bears his memorable nickname,“Che.”“The revolution begins now.”

Not in this picture, though. Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious new film, opening in the United States this month and elsewhere this winter, consists of two parts (each running 131 minutes). The first is set in Cuba, where Guevara helped Fidel Castro overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista in a long guerrilla campaign that ended in December 1958; the second takes place in Bolivia, where Guevara went in 1966 to start a revolution that he hoped would spread throughout Latin America (he was Argentine by birth) and where he died a year later. What’s missing in the film is the very revolution whose beginning he has so solemnly announced.

This is odd but somehow not surprising, because movies about revolutions do tend to focus on the fighting and to ignore the duller, often grimmer business of actually governing in a revolutionary way.

Guevara’s revolution-beginsnow statement is something he really said, and it was stirring enough to reappear, paraphrased, as the wisdom of an Algerian insurgent in Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966“Battle of Algiers.”“It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it,”says one of the more intellectual leaders of the militants in that film.“But it’s only afterward, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.”

Both Guevara and his North African counterpart are, of course, absolutely right: what happens after the battles have been won is indeed the most difficult part of the strange, inherently improvisatory process of revolution - so tricky that many leaders, Mr.Castro among them, manage to maintain power only by declaring a kind of eternal state of revolution. And because this strategy is neither dramatically nor humanly very satisfying, the movies have rarely shown much interest in the internal dynamics of revolutionary governments; in this Mr.Soderbergh’s film is not alone.

But weirdly, Richard Fleischer’s much maligned 1969“Che!,”with its ridiculous exclamation point, does make at least an attempt to deal with the first few years of the Castro regime, to examine the peculiar relationship between the Maximum Leader, Fidel, and the ideological hard-liner Che, and even to acknowledge Guevara’s complicity in the orgy of executions that accompanied the new government’s ascension to power.

Naturally, you never see anything of that sort in films made under the auspices of the revolutionary regimes themselves, for which art exists only to perpetuate the heroic mythology of the (permanent) struggle. That’s as true of Cuba in the past half-century as it was of the Soviet Union in the 70-plus years between the Bolshevik revolution and perestroika, though the early Soviet filmmakers did a much, much better job of mythologizing their cause.

Sergei Eisenstein’s first two films, “Strike” (1924) and “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925), are, despite the crudeness of their propaganda, fiercely exciting as cinema, full of eloquent compositions and startlingly inventive editing. Mr.Castro’s Cuba never enjoyed that sort of cinematic renaissance, not even for a short time.

This would probably have been the case in the French Revolution too, had the movies been invented in time for the likes of Robespierre to lop off the heads of pesky auteurs. And although France is at this point pretty definitively postrevolutionary, it’s still uncommon to see a French film that does full justice to the bloodbath in which the republic was born. The most penetrating movie about the French Revolution, “Danton” (1983), was directed by a Pole, Andrzej Wajda.

So it could be a while before we get the whole story of Guevara, Mr. Castro and the Cuban revolution; and when we do, it’s sure to come from outside Cuba. Probably not from Hollywood, which hasn’t had much success with this piece of history, the most notable attempt being Sydney Pollack’s expensive flop “Havana”(1990). The 2006 film “The Lost City,” which covers much of the same ground, is better, perhaps because it was written by a Cuban exile, G.Cabrera Infante, and directed by a Cuban-American, Andy Garcia.

You can get a little more of the sad story from Julian Schnabel’s moving “Before Night Falls” (2000), about the persecution of the gay Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas, and more still from Nestor Almendros’s blistering documentaries“Improper Conduct”(1984) and “Nobody Listened” (1987).

But that’s if you’re interested in something like the truth, and truth isn’t always of paramount importance when it comes to revolution (or movies, for that matter). Revolution is, in many people’s minds, more about ideals, wild hopes, romance; too many facts, and the world looks impossible to change.