Pen, passion, exile
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 2/2/2001.
Boston Globe
'Before Night Falls,'' Julian Schnabel's film on the life and death of gay
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, begins with a richly evocative sequence that
serves as signature key and recurring leitmotif. We see a little boy, naked,
playing with mud at a riverbank. He's naked because he owns no clothes. He's
playing with mud because he has no toys. All he has is a mother. A moment after
we see the boy, she appears, throwing stones at a man who shows up and begins
addressing the boy. The man is Arenas's father. The mother wants no part of him.
And the little boy is as free as we'll ever see him.
The literal earthiness of Arenas's boyhood has turned into a figurative
earthiness when we see him as a man, played by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem
with an extraordinary emotional range that embraces appetite and tenderness.
There's a touching melancholy about Javier's Arenas; it's the look of a man who
knows, after an initial rush followed by rapid disillusionment, that in Castro's
Cuba nothing he does is going to be right. It's not that he's a political rebel
that guarantees him a life of trouble, or even that he's gay. Rather, it's the
fact that he's such a childlike innocent, living primarily for the
gratifications of flesh and language.
He's the gentlest of loose cannons, but he's a loose cannon all the same.
He's poison to the grim orthodoxy of the military state that Castro's Cuba
became. And where Arenas spent years in prison. Although the film was shot in
Mexico, it does an extraordinary job of penetrating what we're persuaded is a
Cuban society awash in sensuality, machismo and, above all, fear, with the
threat of punishment ever hovering nearby. The swirl of contradictions in that
Cuban society is embodied daringly by Johnny Depp, in a double performance. In
one role, he plays a defiant transvestite smuggler; in another, he appears as a
repressive military officer who can't quite conceal his own homoerotic urges as
he puts the pressure on Arenas.
Bardem is doubly effective because he never plays the victim; he's more like
a thwarted child who knows instinctively that all the ideological rant of which
he has run afoul is just a veneer for much gnarlier, more primal stuff. The
film zigzags through his chaotic life, charting his crash from youthful
idealism to brutal imprisonment and degradation. Downplaying his days in Mariel
after several futile escape attempts, it's saddest of all when he finally
arrives in New York, where his reborn hopes soar as he's driven through
Manhattan on a snowy night, only to crash again as the life is drained out of
him by AIDS. All that's left for him is to snatch a shred of dignity from
arranging his death with his friend and heir, Lazaro Gomez Carriles (Olivier
Martinez).
From start to finish, Schnabel is right there, pouncing with immediacy on
the highs, from Arenas's initial reveling in the Revolution to discovering a
wider world of Havana, and the lows - betrayals, persecutions, abuses,
incarcerations. Stylistically, he takes a giant step beyond his debut film,
''Basquiat.'' His painter's eye serves him well as he recreates not only the
settings but the light of Havana, where he uses grainy, saturated color to
convey the intoxication of Arenas's early highs. Later, in New York, he employs
desaturated color as the end becomes apparent. His intercutting of documentary
footage is also artfully done. But most of all it's the emotional and spiritual
arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night
Falls'' its power.
Jay Carr can be reached by e-mail at jcarr@globe.com
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on
2/2/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
'Night Falls': Bardem Soars
By Michael O'Sullivan.Washington Post Staff Writer.
The Washington Post .
Friday, February 2, 2001; Page WE41
"BEFORE Night Falls" opens with a close-up of a little boy sitting
in a squalid hole in the ground, and as director Julian Schnabel's camera pulls
back we see the naked child surrounded by a world of incredible beauty. "Trees
have a secret life that is only available to those who are willing to climb
them." Thus intones the lyrical, enigmatic voice-over, in the thick (and I
mean viscous as honey) accent of Spaniard Javier Bardem, who plays -- no,
reincarnates -- the late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas.
I say reincarnates, but I have never seen or heard Arenas speak, although
footage of him exists in "Havana," the documentary film that first
inspired Schnabel to tell Arenas's life story (see "Film Notes").
Nevertheless, the actor's performance is so fleshly and full of heat it throbs.
Bardem as Arenas feels like a person, not an impersonation.
Based on Arenas's posthumous 1993 memoir, "Before Night Falls"
begins in 1948 with Arenas's hardscrabble childhood in rural Oriente province in
pre-revolutionary Cuba. The film then tracks him on three main courses: as a
banned artist, as a soon-to-be-disillusioned supporter of Castro and as a gay
man persecuted by the government for his sexuality. The threads are intertwined
with one another in a story line that snakes sinuously toward the writer's
battle with AIDS and 1990 death while living in exile in New York City. The
screenplay, written by Schnabel, Cunningham O'Keefe and Arenas's real-life
friend Lazaro Gomez Carriles, is mostly in heavily Cuban-inflected English, with
ample doses of narration translated from Arenas's books and poetry.
What Schnabel, a painter, brings to the table is not necessarily
biographical accuracy but a kind of visual poetry familiar to viewers of his
first film, "Basquiat," a 1996 biopic based on another martyred
artist, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. It's sometimes difficult to tell
whether what we're watching is happening or merely taking place in a character's
mind.
While Arenas is still a schoolboy, his grandfather flies into a rage when
told by a teacher that his grandson has an aptitude for writing. Grabbing the
boy and an ax, the old man rushes outside to a grove of trees marked with carved
lines of verse and starts chopping in front of the terrified youngster. It's
only a metaphoric foreshadowing of what's to come: After winning a prize for an
early book, Arenas entered a state of perpetual censorship by Castro, having to
resort to publishing his manuscripts abroad. It's noteworthy that at no point
are we shown exactly why his books are bad, except for the fact that they are
beautiful. Beauty, we are told, is the enemy, being something a dictator cannot
control.
Arenas's homosexuality, of course, is also problematic. What complicates
things is the fact that the sexual revolution was taking place simultaneous to
the political one, undermining the free expression of love with an insidious
undertow of puritanism. Soon Arenas is imprisoned on trumped up charges of child
molestation, and it is here that his spirit begins to break in the roiling surf
of Castro's schismatic society. The always remarkable Johnny Depp, playing both
a sadistic prison official and a transvestite inmate in whose body cavities
Arenas smuggles out his literary contraband, is a walking emblem of this
duality.
Keep your eyes peeled for a quick cameo by Sean Penn as a gold-toothed
peasant, but be forewarned: This is not a film about its stars. Schnabel and
company are there not to strut but to serve the sad, sweet tale of an artist's
struggle. In the end, it seems, it's a struggle not just to make art but to
exist, which is itself an art. And to that goal, the cast members, led by the
astonishing Bardem, allow themselves to be devoured by the roles they are
playing.
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (R, 133 minutes) -- Contains nudity, obscenity,
beatings and sexual situations. In English and occasional Spanish with
subtitles. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5, Shirlington 7 and Cinema Arts.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Portrait of (and by) the artist
By James Verniere. Boston
Herald. Friday, February 2, 2001
In his second effort as a film director, Julian Schnabel, the New York City
painter who amassed a fortune in the go-go '80s and was famous for glueing
broken crockery to his canvasses, once again celebrates the life of an artist.
Reinaldo Arenas - the homosexual Cuban novelist and poet who survived
harassment and imprisonment at home, escaped to the United States on the Mariel
Harbor boatlift and died from AIDS in exile in New York City in 1990 - may not
be a household name in this country. But thanks to an extremely compassionate,
life-affirming, essentially comic performance by Cannes Award-winning Spanish
actor Javier Bardem, you're not likely to forget Arenas or his story after
seeing this film.
In keeping with the autobiographical nature of Arenas' work, including the
posthumous 1993 memoir "Before Night Falls,'' the film is narrated,
lyrically, by Bardem (who accepted the role after Benicio Del Toro of "Traffic''
turned it down).
Born into "absolute poverty and freedom'' and raised in a "roomful
of unhappy women,'' Reinaldo exhibits three chief traits as a boy growing up in
tiny remote villages. (Vito Maria Schnabel, the director's son, plays Arenas as
an adolescent.) These are a deep love for his beautiful mother (played by Olatz
Lopez Garmendia, the director's wife), a fondness for gazing in longing at
seminaked men and a "sensitivity for poetry,'' none of which endear him to
his brutish grandfather, especially given the longstanding tradition of machismo
in Cuba. (In Arenas' only recollection of his father, the boy receives two
coins, a bittersweet harbinger of both his "gift'' and premature death.)
After the "liberation'' of Havana (Schnabel uses actual footage of
young, uniformed Castro and Che), Arenas like many Cubans expected to find
freedom in the new revolutionary state. Although he was able to earn a degree at
the University of Havana and enjoy a brief Cuban sexual revolution, he and
other gay men and women, who had fought beside the rebels, met with increasing
state disapproval, officially sanctioned repression and harassment,
surveillance and imprisonment under barbaric conditions. The film, which is
chronological, is a kind of magical-realistic "Pilgrim's Progress''
complete with a Dionysian hero on a quest for love, enlightenment and grace.
If this sounds burdensome or pedantic, it is not. The film is foremost a
tribute to Cuba, Arenas' spiritual mother, and to the mysterious and marvelous
ways an artist transforms the most appalling pain and suffering into things of
beauty.
Unlike the upcoming, opaque biographical film "Pollock,'' "Before
Night Falls'' makes deeply insightful connections between Arenas' life and work
(in a real sense, his life was his work). Because they incorporated Arenas'
novels and poems into their script, screenwriters Cunningham O'Keefe, Lazaro
Gomez Carriles and Schnabel ("Basquiat'') have avoided the common fallacy
of films about artists. That is, that artists are inherently worthy subjects
because they are artists, even if they are miserable human beings. Viewed
through Arenas' eyes, the brutal El Morro prison, for instance, becomes a
Fellini-esque parade of indelible faces and forms. The most memorable of these
is the striking transvestite Bon Bon (played by Johnny Depp, of all people) who
- like the character Kate Winslet plays in "Quills,'' which "Before
Night Falls'' resembles thematically - helps Arenas smuggle a novel out of
prison.
Like Sean Penn's "The Pledge,'' "Before Night Falls'' features
heavyweight cameos. Filmmaker Hector Babenco ("Pixote'') appears as Cuban
author Virgilio Pinera and a virtually unrecognizable Penn, sporting several
gold teeth, plays the peasant rider who gives the young Arenas a lift to the
front to join the revolutionaries. Depp has a subversive dual role, as both Bon
Bon and a macho prison interrogator who, in a dreamlike sequence, flirts with
and tortures Arenas.
Towering above the film is Bardem, whose producer uncle was an associate of
the exiled Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Bardem slips into this role like a
second skin and can hardly disguise his delight in revealing the artist's
expansive soul. In final scenes in which Arenas suffers from AIDS, Bardem
recalls Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia.'' Small-statured, handsome with sad,
slightly protruding eyes, Bardem's Arenas is the artist as eternal boy. For him,
life is a form of play, and in spite of all the roadblocks and setbacks, a
constant path to joy.
(Although not cheap or exploitative, "Before Night Falls'' contains
violence and sexual situations.)
Poetic take on writer
By Liz Braun,
Toronto Sun. Friday,
February 2, 2001
The story of exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas is the story of a quest for
personal, professional, political and sexual freedom.
Arenas comes to life in Before Night Falls, a film of extraordinary beauty
(from director/painter Julian Schnabel, who may finally have found the right
canvas) that tells the poet's story with compassion and humour.
Raised in the countryside by his single mother, Arenas was an enthusiastic
participant in the revolution that brought Castro to power. Arenas got a place
at the University of Havana in the early '60s, and winning a story-writing
contest helped him get a job at the National Library.
He soon became part of the literary scene in the city. And the gay scene. He
was only 20 when his novel, Singing From The Well, was published, but it proved
to be the only book he would ever publish in Cuba. When the Cuban government
began a crackdown on artists and various other 'undesirables,' Arenas had two
strikes against him: He was a writer and he was homosexual.
Before Night Falls keeps a very fine balance between the chaotic political
events surrounding Arenas and the passion with which he nonetheless managed to
live and write. The film has scenes of truly lyrical beauty, but there is always
a sense of impending loss lurking under the narrative. Arenas goes from freedom
to being carefully watched, and then harassed, and then, finally, to jail.
Never, despite the grim circumstances, does the film stop being humorous or
creative or visually arresting -- a handy reference to the artist in question.
When he is imprisoned for two years, for example, Arenas gets the paper and
pencils he needs to continue his writing in exchange for the love letters he
composes for other prisoners to send to their wives.
Javier Bardem, who has already won a Best Actor Award at the Venice Film
Festival for this portrayal and small wonder, plays Reinaldo Arenas as an adult.
Johnny Depp takes on a double role, Sean Penn has a cameo driving a donkey
cart, and such filmmakers as Hector Babenco and Jerzy Skolimowski pop up in the
narrative. Also in the cast are Michael Wincott, Olivier Martinez and Andrea Di
Stefano.
Reinaldo Arenas was able to leave Cuba in 1980 in the Mariel Harbor
boatlift. He died in New York 10 years later. His bestselling memoir, Before
Night Falls, was published in 1993; this film uses bits of his writing and
poetry, memories of friends and a mixture of fact and fiction to tell his story.
Having never read Arenas' work prior to seeing Before Night Falls, this
viewer was inspired to rush out and buy all of his available works. That's some
movie.
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Rated: AA
Director: Julian Schnabel
Stars: Javier Bardem Johnny
Depp
'Utterly transporting'
-- LIZ BRAUN, SUN
Sun Rating: 4 1/2 out of 5
Copyright © 2001, Canoe Limited Partnership.
Before
Night Falls (film's official site) |
