Documentary Inspires Director Julian Schnabel to Tell the Story of
Cuban Writer Arenas
By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Baltimore Sun. Los Angeles Times.
Thursday, March 8, 2001.
The defiant man stared into the camera and said: "For the moment,
my name is Reinaldo Arenas. The Justice Department has declared me stateless, so
legally I don't exist. I'm living in no place, on the edge of society, in any
place in the world."
Arenas, an exiled Cuban author, did this taped interview in the early
1980s, shortly after he had arrived in what he hoped would be his new country,
the United States. It was a short appearance, but full of power, passion and
wit.
And a decade and a half later, it caught the eye of American film
director Julian Schnabel, who watched a documentary about Arenas one night at a
friend's suggestion.
"That made me want to find out more," Schnabel recalled
during a recent visit to Washington to publicize the film.
What he found was a complex and fascinating character who, before his
suicide in the face of AIDS-related illnesses in 1990, waged a long and
ultimately losing battle against the Cuban government through his writings and
his open homosexuality.
Since his introduction to Arenas five years ago, Schnabel followed his
curiosity, translating Arenas' story to the big screen in a searingly painful,
lushly shot portrait. Titled "Before Night Falls" after Arenas'
autobiography, Schnabel's film has been acclaimed across the country, and its
lead actor, Javier Bardem, has been nominated for an Oscar.
Arenas "turned his suffering into beauty, and I found beauty in
his work that I could transform into film," Schnabel said. "And I
think it's a film you can watch more than once because you kind of look at it
the way you would look at a painting. I mean, you know the story, you know the
guy's gonna die, but how the hell does he get there?"
Schnabel, 49, knows the similarities between film and painting well. He
began his career as a highly successful artist who shot to fame in the 1980s
Manhattan art world with avant-garde works that included paintings encrusted
with shards of shattered crockery.
A tall, husky and gregarious man, Schnabel over the years has been
described as charmingly self-confident and shamelessly cocky. But during his
Washington visit, he just appeared frazzled from a day packed with nine media
interviews.
He wasn't too tired to indulge his perfectionism, annoyed at how the
darkening sky outside his hotel room window was interfering with the photo
shoot.
He thought a recent snapshot of him in a national newspaper looked like
"they sent a blind photographer to take my picture," and he was
determined to prevent similar gaffes.
"Those are terrible paintings over there," he snapped,
wagging his finger with disdain at the pastel floral prints on the walls, the
standard hotel-room fare. "You don't want them in the picture."
* * *
It is this same take-charge fussiness that inspired Schnabel to turn
his artistic vision to the big screen. An avid film fan since his childhood in
Brooklyn, N.Y., Schnabel first considered making movies in the early 1990s, when
a film was being made about his friend and fellow New York painter Jean-Michel
Basquiat, who overdosed on heroin in 1988 at 27. After chatting with the script
writers, Schnabel said he decided that he could do a better job. In 1996, he
made his directorial debut with "Basquiat."
"The fact that I can support myself and finance the movie because
I'm a painter gives me the kind of freedom that other directors don't have,"
said Schnabel, whose paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Arenas, 47 when he died, grew up an illegitimate child in rural,
poverty-stricken Cuba. As an adult, he was persecuted because of his
homosexuality and writings that at times portrayed Fidel Castro's government in
a bad light. He was tortured, imprisoned several times and forced to sign
documents including "confessions" and pledges to praise the Communist
government that tormented him.
In the film, Schnabel shows him locked up in solitary confinement--a
filth-smeared, rat-infested, windowless room that seems no bigger than a box.
Arenas escaped Cuba in 1980 as part of the famed Mariel boat lift in which
250,000 "undesirables" were allowed to leave for the United States.
Schnabel insisted that his film was not a political statement. "I
didn't have some kind of dogmatic reason for making the movie," he said. "It's
very hard to tell a story about something that has political implications
without it becoming political. But Reinaldo said, 'I'm not from the right or the
left. And I don't want to be used under any opportunistic political labels. I
tell my truth, as does the Jew that suffered racism or the Russian that's been
in the Gulag."'
Schnabel said that if the movie has a theme, it's when Arenas says: "Always
the drums of militarism stifling the rhythm of poetry and life."
Several scenes in "Before Night Falls" are so vivid that
individual frames resemble carefully constructed moving canvases. In one, a
tropical storm thunders with such vigor we practically can smell the juicy
dollops of rain intermingling with the warm, humid air. In another, Schnabel
shows Arenas lying on his back experiencing his first snowfall in New York, the
large white flakes fluttering down on a face that personifies euphoria.
* * *
People who knew Arenas say that "Before Night Falls" is true
to the author's life and personality.
"I think Reinaldo really, really would have liked it," said
Lazaro Gomez Carriles, one of Arenas' best friends. "It transcends into
something better than just a political movie. I hope that people just see a poet
and a writer who lived his life the way he wanted to, even if he had a lot of
difficulties doing that."
Carriles, who was the heir to Arenas' estate, said several filmmakers
had approached him about making a movie about his friend's life. He declined
because they were reluctant to let him have a part in creating the movie.
Carriles agreed to work with Schnabel after the director set up a screening of "Basquiat"
especially for him, and enlisted his help in writing the script.
"People can take a lot of things from this movie--endurance,
perseverance," said Carriles, who escaped Cuba within weeks of Arenas and
lives in New York.
Although Schnabel insisted his film is about one man--Arenas--he knows
that some viewers might find a larger message in "Before Night Falls."
"The film really is against censorship," he said. "It's
against totalitarianism. Even in this country, with all of its problems and how
messed up it is, and I mean, certainly many people are getting a raw deal here,
at least some can criticize the government without being put in jail."
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
Before Night
Falls, the movie.
Before
Night Falls, the book. | 