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By Stephen Holden.
The New York Times. December
22, 2000
Before Night Falls" was shown as part of this year's New York Film
Festival. Following are excerpts from Stephen Holden's review, which appeared in
The New York Times on Oct. 6. The film opens today in Manhattan.
Julian Schnabel's film "Before Night Falls" belongs to what might
be called the life-is-but-a-dream school of biographical cinema in the way it
hovers ethereally over its subject and conjures up fragments of his
consciousness in brilliant, disconnected flashes.
Adapted from a memoir by the exiled Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas,
this haunting film portrays that homosexual dissident writer as a desperate,
unfulfilled searcher for a lost heaven on earth that he experiences only briefly
as a very young man. No sooner has he tasted the ecstasies of this pagan
paradise than it is snatched away by the punishing, gray-faced Communist
revolution.
Relentlessly persecuted for being gay and for having his manuscripts
smuggled out of the country and published abroad, Arenas eventually migrated to
the United States along with thousands of other Cubans during the 1980 Mariel
boatlift. But if exile brought him freedom, it provided little satisfaction.
After living unhappily in Miami for a time (the film omits this period) Arenas
settled in New York, where he committed suicide in 1990. (He was suffering from
AIDS.) In his suicide letter he bitterly blamed Fidel Castro for all his
troubles, including his death.
For all the pain and disappointment it encapsulates, "Before Night
Falls" is far from a glum film. Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through
Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright,
feverish illuminations. The movie makes little attempt to psychoanalyze Arenas
or to explain him. Instead it dips into his imagination, plumbing the sources of
his art in scenes that evoke his closeness with nature and his obsession with
sex.
Javier Bardem, the gifted Spanish actor who portrays Arenas and who bears a
striking resemblance to him, narrates the film (whose screenplay incorporates
swatches of Arenas's posthumously published 1993 memoir) in a thickly accented
English that is occasionally difficult to follow. The portrait it paints is of a
slightly mad romantic who never recovers from the dashing of his illusions.
Freedom for Arenas didn't simply mean freedom of political expression; it
was synonymous with his being a wild boy who said he had had 5,000 sexual
encounters by the age of 25.
When the Communist revolution on which he had pinned his inchoate boyhood
hopes clamped down on Cuba's free-for-all sexual climate and threw homosexuals
in prison camps, Arenas began to throw a lifelong tantrum. Liberation wasn't
supposed to bring repression.
The film's early scenes of Arenas's dirt-poor childhood in Oriente province,
where he was brought up by a single mother and his grandparents, are dizzyingly
gorgeous, surreal evocations of a sopping semi-jungle environment where he
played in mud holes and carved his early poems into trees. Childhood memories of
torrential floods rushing across the landscape have a kind of a voluptuous
majesty; as Arenas matures, the movie returns again and again to images of
water.
His happiest moments are his days spent lolling on the beach in male company
and having indiscriminate sex everywhere and with everyone. One of his first
boyfriends, Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano), a handsome bisexual stud and heartbreaker
(who later betrays him), is held up as Arenas's erotic ideal, a rampantly
priapic force of nature.
In these scenes the film deliciously evokes pre-Castro Cuba as a sensual
endless summer of hot, pliable flesh and lapping turquoise waters. Later, when
Arenas escapes from prison, he steals out of his cell, squeezes through a fence
and dives into the ocean. Later still, in an unsuccessful attempt to flee Cuba,
he floats out to sea on an inner tube.
While still a boy, the film recalls, Arenas desperately wanted to join the
Communist guerrillas, and it skillfully weaves period color film clips of the
revolutionary celebration with similarly grainy original scenes. No wonder,
then, that when the revolution, which he had naïvely equated with personal
salvation, repressed homosexuals and artists, he became its bitter, unforgiving
enemy.
"Before Night Falls" skips lightly over Arenas's persecution and
imprisonment. Thrown into an overcrowded jail teeming with murderers and
rapists, he earns respect (and cigarettes) by writing letters for his illiterate
fellow prisoners. In the most nightmarish scene he is thrown into solitary
confinement in a cell, lighted with a single hissing bulb, that is so cramped he
is unable to stand up straight.
Johnny Depp has flashy dual cameo roles as a transvestite who smuggles
Arenas's rolled-up manuscripts out of prison and as a prison guard who uses
sexual manipulation to secure Arenas's signature on a statement declaring his
own writing to be worthless.
Once the film moves to New York, its colors dim, as if all the light had
gone out of Arenas's life. As he becomes ill, he is dutifully attended by his
companion, Lazaro Gomes Garriles (Olivier Martinez). Long before Arenas kills
himself (with pills and a plastic bag), his will to live appears to be spent.
One of the movie's final and most resonant scenes intercuts images of the slums
of New York with the grand but now crumbling architecture of contemporary
Havana.
"Before Night Falls" is a larger, more emotionally sweeping film
than Mr. Schnabel's 1996 movie debut, "Basquiat." But like its
predecessor it is essentially a painter's movie. Despite its copious narration,
it often feels as if the words of the screenplay were scrawled onto the canvas
as an afterthought.
Like many of Mr. Schnabel's paintings, this cinematic canvas is consciously
heroic in its scale. Yet "Before Night Falls" is mercifully neither
hagiographic nor politically strident. And for all the brutality Arenas endured
in his life, the movie is surprisingly gentle and free of jarring shocks. If "Before
Night Falls" doesn't give us Arenas's life as he actually experienced it,
it offers penetrating glimpses into his life as he may have dreamed it.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
The book at Amazon.com:
Before
Night Falls | 