William Pretorius. News 24. 11/05/2001 11:42 - (SA).
Filming books is always tricky. What do you include, what do you leave out?
Director Julian Schnabel's omitted quite a bit of Reinaldo Arenas' life in his
version of the poet and novelist's memoirs.
Arenas was tortured and imprisoned in Castro's Cuba for being
counter-revolutionary, for writing poetry and novels that didn't glorify the
regime. His life's well-known, so this isn't really a what-happens-next movie.
Arenas' novels were smuggled out of the country by friends, and he became
well-known overseas. This, in a sense, saved him: Castro didn't want to provoke
an international incident by actually killing him, although his actions drove
other poets and writers to suicide.
Arenas was allowed to leave Cuba in 1980 on the Marial boatlift when Castro
allowed prostitutes, homosexuals, criminals and the mentally insane to leave
Cuba for the US.
Arenas was given permission as a gay, but he was also on a list of those
forbidden to leave the country. Before boarding the boat, he managed to change
the "e" on his passport to an "i" - a scene that seems to
mystify viewers, as it's not made clear in the movie. He escaped to the US where
he, as he put it, he exchanged one prison for another.
Schnabel takes us on a quick tour of Arenas' life, in spite of the movie
being 133 minutes. Arenas' circle of friends has been simplified, a strange
network of lovers, artist and informers. Schnabel, too, has made some changes
that alter facts according to the memoir.
Still, for me, it's a far more successful transformation of book into film
than the dreadful All The Pretty Horses, based on Cormac McCarthy's neo-Western
novels. The movie's created a new visual life from the book.
A friend remarked that this was the kind of film a painter would make, and
she's exactly right. Arena's childhood, the poverty, his feeling for nature, is
pithily summed up in a shot of a baby in a large, square, grave-like hole, a
sinister womb that's returned to at the end. This claustrophobic image contrasts
with his love of the sea, of its open restlessness. And that hole becomes later,
a prison, a cell for solitary confinement.
As a writer, Arenas was a kind of natural, powerful force, intensely
reworking Cuba's rich life and society around him in his novels. Typing for him
was similar to orchestrating a piano concerto. His books, starting from the
earliest, changed the novel's form: they included poetry, stage dialogue,
regular and irregular length lines.
Today, I guess, we'd call them post-modern. But for me, they're words trying
to escape the confines of a page, using the possibilities of the page to its
fullest. Schnabel's style reflects this in the movie. The editing gives the film
a quick pace, some moments are dramatically heightened through a restless camera
- the camera works in this movie, it's not passive - and there are voice-overs,
verses from his poetry, quotations written on the screen.
There's a section in which a documentary on Arenas is recreated, and he
talks directly to us. Add to this dialogue that's both spoken in English, and
then, when it's Cuban, subtitled, and you've got a movie that's visually
concentrated and focused.
Schnabel, in fact, has destroyed the book and recreated it as film. Still,
the movie wouldn't have worked, wouldn't have found an anchor, had it not been
for Javier Bardem's brilliantly sustained performance as Arenas. He's never
overwhelmed by the movie's jumping around, by its restlessness, its broken,
fractured structure.
He's never didactic as Arenas, never allows his performance to slip into the
melodrama of being a victim. It's always difficult to portray a writer as
writing is an inner voyage, and not interesting to look at being done. But
Arenas' novels were lyrical, emotional prose that turned into pure poetry at
times, and Bardem convinces us that he's the kind of person to write them.
This destructive recreation is probably one of the best ways to film books,
especially emotionally and literary complex works like Arenas's. They rework the
book, make one curious to go to the original. They extend the book - and, best
of all, the book's undamaged. It's always there for whoever wants to read it.
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