By Robert Dominguez, New York Daily News Feature Writer. August 29, 2000.
Director Julian Schnabel's latest tribute to a troubled artist has him turning to one of Cuba's more famous "worms."
"Before Night Falls" is based on the memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas, the famed dissident author denounced as a gusano, or worm — Fidel Castro's term for a traitor to the cause — for his anti-Communist writings.
Selected for the Venice Film Festival, the movie covers Arenas' tragic life from his youth in rural Cuba to his involvement with pro-Castro forces during the revolution, and from his rise as an internationally acclaimed novelist to his eventual persecution as a homosexual and enemy of the state.
Arenas, who escaped to the U.S. during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, settled in New York and contracted AIDS. The film ends with his suicide in 1990 at 47.
Schnabel, a renowned Manhattan painter, says he was drawn to the story because Arenas was able to "turn suffering into beauty."
"His whole life is like a fuga — an escape," says Schnabel, whose only other film is "Basquiat," a 1996 biography of controversial artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Arenas was imprisoned for two years after his second book, the surrealistic novel "El Mundo Alucinante" ("Hallucinations"), was deemed counterrevolutionary. The manuscript, about a 19th-century Mexican monk who fights oppression, had been smuggled out of Cuba and published in
France in 1969; it received international recognition as the best novel of the year.
"His reward [for that] was becoming a fugitive in his own country," says Schnabel. "And I don't think he found paradise in the U.S., either."
"Before Night Falls," which will also screen at the Toronto Film Festival in September and the New York Film Festival in October before it opens in theaters later this fall, stars Spanish actor Javier Bardem as Arenas.
Using Mexican locations for the scenes set in Cuba, the film also features Sean Penn and Johnny Depp. Both are old friends of Schnabel's who were likewise fascinated with Arenas' life and work.
"Reinaldo lived on the outside of society, and that's a subject I'm familiar with," says Schnabel. "This isn't really a biopic, it's really like a novel about a man being constantly chased."
Original Publication Date: 8/29/00 | 