By Don Shewey.
The New York Times, November 5, 2000.
REINALDO ARENAS, the gay Cuban writer who was educated, persecuted,
imprisoned and exiled by Castro's Communist regime, spent the last nine years of
his life in New York City. Before he died in 1990 at the age of 47, he had
written "some of the most beautiful poems by a Latin American author in the
20th century," according to the novelist and poet Jaime Manrique. "And
it was here," Mr. Manrique continues, "that he dictated, in a rage, an
autobiography that is one of the most liberating works ever written and a
document that serves as an indictment of what Latin American Stalinist forces,
and Fidel Castro, did, not just to homosexuals but to all those who dared to be
different."
That autobiography, "Before Night Falls," was published in English
in 1993 and named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book
Review. Now it has been made into a feature film by Julian Schnabel, the painter
who made his filmmaking debut in 1996 with "Basquiat."
The book is a literary scrapbook of long and short takes, moving back and
forth in time as memories boil up to the surface and disperse. The film
capitalizes on this structure. Mr. Schnabel created the screenplay in
collaboration with Cunningham O'Keefe, a friend of his, and Lázaro Gómez
Carriles, the heir to Arenas's estate. They drew on scenes from not only the
memoir but also the novels "Hallucinations" and "The Color of
Summer" as well as a long prose poem called "The Parade Ends." In
addition, the director freely alternates scenes of meticulously detailed realism
with flights of fantasy.
This collage includes dabs of invented incident as well as archival footage
of the Cuban revolution and the 1980 Mariel Harbor boatlift, which carried
Arenas and over 120,000 Cubans to bittersweet freedom in Miami.
Both the book and the film unpredictably intermingle idyllic and erotic
imagery with irreverent humor and tales of torture all the more horrifying for
being a little-documented piece of recent history. When "Before Night Falls"
opened at the New York Film Festival last month, the Times critic Stephen Holden
wrote, "Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life,
reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish
illuminations. . . . It dips into his imagination, plumbing the sources of his
art in scenes that evoke his closeness with nature and his obsession with sex."
The centerpiece of the movie, which opens commercially on Dec. 22, is the
leading performance by Javier Bardem, the handsome star of such Spanish films as
"Jamón, Jamón," "Mouth to Mouth," and Pedro
Almodóvar's "Live Flesh." For his remarkable embodiment of
Reinaldo Arenas, Mr. Bardem won the best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival
last summer, where the film was runner-up for the grand jury prize.
What inspired Julian Schnabel, a twice-married painter with a New York
Jewish background, to make a film about a gay poet who escaped from Castro's
Cuba and committed suicide rather than die of AIDS? That was the question on my
mind when I arrived at the imposing building Mr. Schnabel owns in the West
Village.
He met me at the door, friendly and garrulous, wearing a sleeveless denim
vest with a sarong tied around his ample waist, his hair and goatee long and
unkempt. As we made our way from the second-floor living space to his
third-floor studio, we walked through gargantuan rooms filled with gargantuan
paintings. One room was furnished like a Victorian sitting room, another
suggested a dim gallery at the Met's Michael Rockefeller Wing, and the kitchen
looked like something from an Italian farmhouse, with a long rough wooden table
still laden with breakfast dishes.
The cavernous skylit studio somehow seemed practically empty, despite the
presence of a grand piano, a large round work table, some armchairs and numerous
massive paintings in various stages of completion. There seemed to be a whole
other network of rooms beyond the studio, because people kept appearing from
behind closed doors an elderly Spanish-speaking gentleman taking Mr.
Schnabel's pit bull, Zeus, out for a walk, for instance, and the painter's wife,
Olatz Lopez Garmendia (a Spanish-born model who plays Arenas's mother in the
movie). It was the afternoon before the second screening at the New York Film
Festival, and the phone lines were busy with last-minute logistics. The
environment impressed me as being both self-consciously "legendary"
and enviably cool.
Mr. Schnabel said he'd first heard about Arenas through a Cuban real estate
agent in Miami named Esther Percal. "She told me I had to see this
documentary that Jana Bokova made called 'Havana,' " Mr. Schnabel said. "So
for $25 we bought a black-market copy of it in a bodega in Little Havana. It's
an oral history of Cuba, interviews mixed together with fragments of these
people's writings, including Virgilio Piñera and Guillermo Cabrera
Infante. Reinaldo comes on and starts talking, and the guy is so funny and so
modest. I was so impressed with him that I read 'Before Night Falls.' "
He had just finished making "Basquiat," a smart, stylish and
insightful portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the prodigiously talented painter
who, like Mr. Schnabel, emerged as a blazing star of the New York art world in
the 1980's but who flamed out in a drug overdose at the age of 27. "After I
made 'Basquiat,' a movie shot in New York that was very vertical, I wanted to
make a movie like 'The Seven Samurai' or 'Andrei Rublev,' " Mr. Schnabel
said. "I wanted to shoot outdoors. I wanted a huge depth of field."
Arenas's book offered up just such depth, with its plethora of poetic
images: the dirt- poor countryside, the gleaming fields of sugar cane harvested
with revolutionary fervor, the island as penitentiary, the tropical boy's first
glimpse of snow, the ghostly existence of an exile in New York.
There would turn out to be significant similarities between Mr. Schnabel's
two movies. Both champion highly original artists who achieved some measure of
fame without being assimilated into the mainstream. "I'm interested in the
distance between people and society, the distance between how one person sees
something and the way everybody else sees it," he said. "That's
something you can do with a film."
Among the many pleasures of "Basquiat" were Mr. Schnabel's savvy
way with a soundtrack, his sly use of celebrities (David Bowie played Andy
Warhol, and the director himself was represented by a character played by Gary
Oldman), and his interpolation of nonlinear elements to suggest an artist's
inner consciousness. The same surprising mixture informs "Before Night
Falls," in which Sean Penn and Johnny Depp make flashy cameo appearances.
"I feel like with most movies, I always know what people are going to
say, what the next scene is going to be," Mr. Schnabel said. "Maybe
it's because I'm always thinking about five different things at once, but I
believe reality is layered the way this movie is. You don't have to communicate
in a way that's so didactic, pedantic, where your food is chewed for you. I give
the audience more credit and let them take the ride for themselves."
Without being preachy, Mr. Schnabel took seriously the responsibility of
representing Arenas's story. "By the nature of his mere existence, Reinaldo
becomes a political figure," he said. "By the nature of me deciding to
tell his story, it becomes a political movie. I don't know a damn thing about
politics. I'm not on the right or the left, and I don't want to be used under
any opportunistic labels. What I think is really good is that I'm not
homosexual, and I'm not Cuban. You can never be totally objective about
anything, but people can't say, 'Oh, this guy's got an ax to grind.' I'm
somebody who's verifying that these things happened. It's a moment in history.
Castro does control the newspaper and the television in Cuba. Many people who
lived there don't believe there are forced- labor camps."
Those familiar with Arenas and his experience of contemporary Cuba agree
that Mr. Schnabel succeeded in packing an enormous amount of the story into a
two-hour film.
"It's impressive to see how deeply and profoundly a foreigner like
Schnabel understood Reinaldo's agony," the Cuban documentary filmmaker
Orlando Leal said in a telephone interview. "He saw it as a human tragedy
beyond any partisan point of view, without any political agenda," Mr. Leal
said.
In addition to "PM," an excerpt of which runs behind the closing
credits of "Before Night Falls," Mr. Leal's films include "Improper
Conduct," in which he and the late cinematographer Nestor Alméndros
interviewed Cuban homosexuals, including Arenas, about their treatment under
Castro.
"I knew Reinaldo very well," Mr. Leal said, "and I was
impressed with the way Javier Bardem captured his speech pattern, his body
language, his essence. It would have been easy to create a caricature of a
brilliant, humorous homosexual, but he served the many facets of Reinaldo's
personality."
Needless to say, as in any biographical portrait, there are a few aspects of
Arenas's life that don't make it to the film. In this case, readers of "Before
Night Falls" will recall that virtually every other page of the memoir
details some kind of sexual encounter with animals, trees, uncles, cousins,
soldiers, fellow bus passengers, etc.
It's no criticism of Mr. Schnabel's film to point out this omission.
According to the director, the first screenplay he commissioned was so faithful
to Arenas's capacious sexual appetite that not even Pasolini could have filmed
it.
Similarly, the film depicts Arenas's illness within the established
conventions of Hollywood's treatment of AIDS a halting walk and a few
tasteful spots on the pallid face of a movie star. Whereas in an essay
memorializing Arenas in his book "Eminent Maricones," Jaime Manrique
recalls the last time the two men met:
"The door opened, and I almost gasped. Reinaldo's attractive features
were hideously deformed: half his face looked swollen, purple, almost charred,
as if it were about to fall off."
Perhaps it was merciful Mr. Schnabel to spare moviegoers this sight.
Nevertheless, the director delivers his own grotesque image of the Cuban
writer's demise: he dies with a plastic shopping bag bearing the "I H NY"
logo over his face.
When I pressed him to recall what it was about the memoir that seized his
filmmaker's imagination, he started by saying: "I'd always been in love
with Cuba. I was born in 1951. My parents took me to Florida as a kid. I was
weaned on Cuban music. I was always in the yard listening to Trio Matamoros,
Celia Cruz and Ignacio Pinera." He talked about his wife's Basque family
heritage, and his admiration for Walt Whitman, and his trips to Cuba.
"It's a great country and it's very beautiful," he said. "It's
just a pity than an Italian tourist has more rights than a Cuban citizen."
And he repeatedly recited from memory long passages of Arenas's writing
sometimes in Spanish as well as English as if to establish his
credentials.
Finally, he stopped and said: "I really couldn't explain or give a
logical or reasonable excuse why I should make this movie. I couldn't explain to
Cabrera Infante or anyone I wanted to talk to what would qualify me to make this
movie.
"Because I liked Cuban music when I was a baby? So what? What was the
qualification? I still couldn't give you that answer."
This struck me as the most honest, the most touching and possibly the most
interesting explanation of why anyone makes a movie. Now I understood the
disconcerting recitations. At some point Mr. Schnabel caught Arenas fever, and
even after spending three years making the movie, he's still burning.
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