Jay Stone. The
Ottawa Citizen . Friday 23 March 2001
Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls, a layered and pensive filmography of
the late Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, is just what you would expect
from a movie maker who comes to the craft as a painter with a special interest
in the textures of neo-expressionism (and the structures of self-expressionism.)
Flamboyant and poetic, Before Night Falls is told in bold strokes across an
uneven canvas: slashes of the blues and greens of Cuba before the revolution,
splotches of the grime and glory of Castro's march on Havana, a sudden closeup
of a face both sad and pugilistic, the saturated colour of a post-revolutionary
nightclub where a dance floor samba is played to a soundtrack of sad viola
music, as if Schnabel is dabbing thick oils on an old newspaper clipping to make
the collage his own.
The sad and pugilistic face belongs to Javier Bardem, in an Oscar-nominated
role as Arenas, whose desire to write -- through persecution, imprisonment and
the general languid hatred of beauty that comes from totalitarian fervor -- is
both intense and frightened. Bardem, with his prizefighter's nose and poet's
eyes, gives a rich and full-formed portrait of a writer, perhaps not as driven
as the specimen drawn in Geoffrey Rush's ferocious Marquis de Sade (in his
Oscar-nominated performance as a thwarted sexual genius in Quills) but no less
tenacious.
Arenas was born in Cuba's poor countryside -- Schnabel presents him as a
baby playing in what looks like a freshly dug grave, from which the camera
speeds away along the ground, like a particularly athletic snake -- and his
talents were discovered young.
When his teacher comes to his house to announce that the boy has the makings
of a poet, his grandfather glares at him, slams the table, then picks up an axe
and rushes outside to chop down a tree. Before Night Falls, based on Arenas's
memoir of the same name, is layered with quickly drawn scenes that sketch an
emotion and fill it in with an unexpected tone that only a painter could bring
to the screen. Schnabel, whose previous film was Basquiat, has developed an eye
for the surprising moving image to go along with a judicious sense of colour.
Arenas was a homosexual, and although Before Night Falls paints a subculture
of gay eroticism that was burgeoning even as the political revolution was in its
heyday, it is soon clear that the zest for freedom did not include the queer
life. Sex is an important part of the film, but it is used mostly as an ideal,
like democracy or freedom, through which we see the repression of the
revolution.
The facts of Arenas's life -- manuscripts smuggled out to be published
elsewhere, punishment in Cuba's El Morro prison where the novelist survives by
writing letters for the rapists and murderers who are his cellmates, attempts to
escape to Florida ("I have an inner tube I was saving. It's yours") --
are woven by Schnabel into an abstract portrait that seems meant to bypass the
brain and go straight through the eyes.
Before Night Falls is more like a sculpture from which more and more has
been chipped away until we get only the hollows of a life, the "negative
space" of incident: two men swim synchronously, then walk on a rooftop,
eyeglasses are removed from a handsome face, a jittery camera moves in for a
kiss. The effect is at once visceral and distancing. The characters in Arenas's
life -- Pepe Malas (Angrea Di Stefano), who introduces the writer to Havana's
gay life, or Lazaro Gomez Garriles (Olivier Martinez), a friend he meets after
leaving prison -- are confusing and incidental. The film counts on us to follow
a serpentine narrative; Schnabel, a famous self-promoter who has high praise for
this movie, plays with the storyline the way an abstract painter teases
brushstrokes and thickness into a picture from which the viewer must extract
both the meaning and the artistic ego. The result is both bold and pensive, and
it serves to keep the deepest emotions at bay.
That's not true of the entire film. Bardem (Live Flesh) dives into the role
and in some scenes -- a confrontation with an army officer around a campfire,
for instance -- he finds humanity, humour and courage that keep the film from
tipping over into artistic exuberance. Schnabel's use of music, especially the
viola score of Lou Reed's Rouge in the nightclub scene and a sad ballad at a
Havana orgy, is further counterpoint, as is his use of guest stars: Sean Penn as
a peasant who says, "Your mama know you're going to yoin the rebels?"
and Johnny Depp as a prison drag queen who can store massive amounts of reading
material in his rectum and also as a handsome prison official who torments
Arenas.
Like all tales of struggling artists, Before Night Falls is a tragedy that
is ultimately a tribute to the indomitable spirit. What lingers, though, are the
images: it's as if we've flipped through an album of beautifully proportioned
photographs from which we must reconstruct a life, helped along by a performance
that seems almost unbearably brave.
Before Night Falls ** 1/2
Starring:
Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano
Directed by: Julian
Schnabel
Written by: Cunningham O'Keefe, Lazaro Gomez Carriles, Julian
Schnabel
Rating: AA (Not recommended for children)
Playing at:
ByTowne Cinema, today to March 31
(In English with some Spanish with
English subtitles)
Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive, a CanWest
company. All rights reserved
Before
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