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Before Night Falls

2000, Movie, R, 126 mins

Before Night Falls: Review

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
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In adapting celebrated Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the fiery memoir published shortly after his AIDS-related death in 1990, Julian Schnabel has taken some liberties. Schnabel and his cowriters toned down its bilious, anti-Castro tone, rearranged events, invented characters and trimmed most of the book's graphic sex scenes. Yet the figure of Arenas still springs full-blown from this powerful film, thanks largely to the filmmakers use of Arenas's own writing, and an incredible performance from Javier Bardem. Cuba, 1943: Arenas is born dirt poor to a beautiful mother (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) and a wayward father who disappeared without even bothering to marry her. ("I was proof of her failure," Bardem intones in the beautifully tempered voiceover narration.) Growing up on his grandparents' farm, surrounded by similarly abandoned aunts, Arenas discovers his three great passions: writing, water and beautiful men. As a teenager, Arenas (Bardem) takes advantage of the revolutionary fervor sweeping Cuba in the wake of Batista's overthrow, and leaves home to join Castro's rebels. He eventually winds up in Havana, where he gets his first novel published and is initiated into the city's booming gay underground, thanks to bisexual friend Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano). But the sexual revolution that accompanied Castro's rise is short-lived, and life for a gay, anti-Castro writer soon becomes extremely dangerous under a regime with little tolerance for homosexuality, dissent or counterrevolutionary artists. This is potent stuff, and as Arenas endures the nightmare of a Cuban concentration camp and, later, exile and terminal illness, Bardem's performance is simply shattering. The film has the grainy look of sun-bleached color snapshots, and is peppered with great cameos: Johnny Depp does double duty as a prison drag queen and a Cuban lieutenant, Sean Penn is nearly unrecognizable as a Cuban peasant, and Brazilian director Hector Babenco (KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN) appears briefly as Arenas's literary mentor, Virgilio Pinera. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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