Before Night Falls
***
Cinema
Releases - June 15, 2001
Certificate 15. 133 minutes. Directed by Julian
Schnabel. Written by Lazaro Gomes Carriles, Cunningham O'Keefe, Julian Schnabel;
based on the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas. Starring Javier Bardem, Oliver Martinez,
Johnny Depp, Andrea Di Stefano, Sean Penn.
"My book won the French prize for best foreign
novel… and yet I don't have a home."
So says the persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas
in "Before Night Falls", a movie that captures the feeling
of unpredictability I've long suspected hangs in the air of oppressive regimes.
Movies like "The Killing Fields" give us great stories and create atmospheres
of danger, but their characters usually have areas they know are safe and
areas they know are danger zones -- in reality that can't always be the case.
A hideout can be broken into, an embassy is just a building, mail is just
something you're entrusting to someone else.
"Before Night Falls" depicts writing a novel in
secrecy, trying to hold a party in a nation where gatherings are illegal
and smuggling something out of the country in a way that imparts to us the
logistical problems. When Arenas has to get himself on a raft and escape
with his book, we don't just dissolve to a shot of him washing up on a beach
-- we follow the technicalities of him building his craft, protecting his
paper, plotting his safety.
This vivid capturing of time and place is what
makes the movie so effective. Arenas is a fascinating character -- an initial
supporter of the Castro revolution who found himself a victim of the resulting
system, which frowned on artists and did not tolerate homosexuality. But
his story could have easily been made into a sappy Oscar bid. The details
of the "Before Night Falls" screenplay and direction elevate it above heroic
biography; it is a clever portrait of trying to get on with life in a chaotic
environment, where hostile forces remain somewhere in the background, threatening
to interrupt at any random moment.
Julian Schnabel, the director, also made "Basquiat",
another brilliant film about the life of a tortured artist that avoided
cliché and focused on how environment and personality ended up shaping
a life and career. Here he does a memorable job of documenting the kind of
life the resolute Arenas led amid Cuba's searing heat, grime and strange
laws. The other essential component in this piece is Javier Bardem, the lead
actor -- a huge celebrity in his native Spain, here playing the kind of strange
and daring role that most American stars would be too timid to
touch.
Movies are more likely to reach kids than Solzenitsyn
novels, so "Before Night Falls" should be shown to all those pretentious
bourgeois youngsters who go round in Castro and Guevara shirts, thinking
it's smart to glorify the paraphernalia of old-school communism. The freedom
that gives them the right to wear political clothing is not available under
authoritarianism -- two hours watching Reinaldo Arenas should help them ponder
that thought.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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