Poor Steven Soderbergh.

He shot to prominence as the youngest ever winner of the Palme d'Or with his first feature film Sex, Lies & Videotape; he picked up the directing Oscar for his massive and highly impressive Altmanesque Traffic. And he's the man behind the enormously successful (though perennially disappointing) 'Ocean's' series. And yet Stevie wants more.

Whether his success here at Cannes in 1989 has deluded him we're not here to judge, but a man who can follow the taught and entertaining Out of Sight with pretentious sub-Tarkovsky dud The Limey and then top even that by daring to bungle a remake of the Russian master’s Solaris, has got to be seeing the world wrong. His general pattern ever since has been an Ocean film of ever-diminishing quality followed by an 'art-house' flick that even Stevie admits is not very good (cf. The Good German).

Benicio del Toro - the only good thing in Che?

Yesterday his labour of love, the four-and-a-half hour anti-biopic of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevera,  has premiered at Cannes, the response has been less than positive. The word on the street is that Lawrence of Arabia (the reference point for all bio-(e)pics) it most certainly 'aint. But then this film was always going to be an unknown quantity: having initially missed the deadline, festival gods shined brightly on their favourite son Stevie (Cannes works like a family outfit, once you're in you're in) offering the unseen film a bye into the comp.

While these kinds of gambles on the part of festival organisers sometimes yield success and myth in equal measure (I'm thinking of Francis Ford Coppola's classic war-film Apocalypse Now - thought to be dead in the water, a dud, a car-crash - Coppola brought it to Cannes three years late, announced that it is 'not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam' and promptly won his second Palm) it seems this time the strategy has backfired.

It is now widely thought that this version of Soderbergh's exercise in anti-drama – it should be remembered that Che led an action packed life though Stevie has chosen to play down all sense of adventure! – will never be seen again. It also leads me to believe that Stevie has disppeared on a puff of his own misguided aesthetic aspirations!

Did David Lean or Hitchcock ever eschew commerciality, drama, suspense or beauty for the sake of a scantily clad ‘idea’ or in the name of an abstract formal experiment tentatively monikered ‘art’? And does Alain Resnais, a director Coppola name-checks as much as he does the fabulous success of his winery, and one Soderbergh undoubtedly adores, set out to make deliberately obscure films that bore and befuddle?

The answer to both these questions must surelyt be a resounding NO! - I wonder what the answer would be if we were to ask the same of Stevie ‘want-to-be-' Soderbergh.

Tune in later for more news and views from (what surely must now be) day 200 of the Cannes Festival de Film, 2008!