Julian Schnabel’s film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoirs is a great film. Inevitably, much of the book is missing, but its essences and most of its themes survive. The film is not as raw -- sexually or otherwise -- as the book, but had Arenas lived longer, the book might have been less raw, too.
Schnabel (who is credited with coauthoring the film script) even chose to illustrate something that it would not have occurred me to include: Arenas’s typology of Cuban homosexuals -- a typology in which he himself did not fit. This unlikely material fits in smoothly and probably helps audiences unfamiliar with the homosexual subculture under the repression by Castro’s regime with its block-level surveillance of any “counter-revolutionary” activity. It is also a good example of Arenas's eviscerating humor.
Although there is hardly any sex in the film (one very brief part of illustrating the typology), the film is suffused with sensuality and sexuality. Just the nonjudgmental representation of so flamboyant a homosexual is shocking to some Americans, but there is one relationship in which more sexual detail definitely is needed. The whole point of “Who’s the man?”/ “You’re the man, because you know judo” exchange is that the bisexual man who is more conventionally masculine in appearance (the one who knows judo) was penetrated by the somewhat effeminate entirely homosexual one.
Fumbling that and not making the nature of the mid-1960s concentration camp for the “pink brigade” sufficiently clear are the only faults I find with the adaptation. I loathe the Julian Schnabel’ paintings for which he became famous during the 1980s for, among other things, their ugliness. The film “Before Night Falls,” in contrast is beautiful to look at, even when what is being shown is not beautiful. The images flow very well, too. There are many beautiful tropical compositions, but these never seem like stills. Indeed, the camera is rarely still. I’m tempted to compare “The Thin Red Line” for the visual lushness, but unlike Malick’s film, the images in “Before Night Falls” are not a substitute for narrative development. What one sees on the screen advances the storyline and/or provides insight into the character Reinaldo Arenas and how he saw the world, first the tropical paradise of Cuba turned into totalitarian hell, then the beauties and squalors of Manhattan, where he spent his last years.
(The film was photographed by Xavier Pérez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas and edited by Michael Berenbaum. Being unfamiliar with their earlier work, and having missed Schnabel’s debut film “Basquiat,” I don’t know how much should be credited to Schnabel. So painterly a look in a film directed by a painter-turned-film-director would normally be credited to the director, but the look is so different from his paintings!)
The very international cast, including Schnabel’s son as a teenage Reinaldo, are also excellent. Sean Penn’s accent is strange, but he does what needs to be done in the very small part he plays. The heterosexual Spanish actor Javier Bardem has to play a very complex homosexual character in sickness and health (and drug-crazed and zombified by solitary confinement). And he has to play it in English and, what he has said was even more difficult for him, Cuban Spanish. Oh, yes, and he also has to be credible as a writer, because this is the rare biopic about a writer in which the writing is actually important. Bardem is phenomenal and strikingly resembles Arenas as well as personifying his character.
The most attractive man in the film is the French actor Olivier Martinez as Lazaro, the man whose American experiences are the basis for Arenas’s novel The Doorman. The Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano plays the viciously self-absorbed bisexual collaborator with the regime, Pepe Malas. The ever-adventurous Johnny Depp is used to illustrate the point that machista (the prison commandante) and drag (Bon Bon) are two sides of the same coin (machismo).
Besides getting Depp and Penn in small parts, Schnabel also enlisted Brazilian director Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski to play Arenas’s mentors, the martyred Cuban writers José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, the Canadian actor Michael Wincott as Herberto Zorilla Ochoa, the writer put on a show trial to condemn the crimes against the revolution of artists.
Fidel Castro plays himself in various archival footage. He is the #1 villain in Arenas’s book (followed by Gabriel García Marquez). He remains that in the film, but a fairly remote one. As I suggested above, the horror of the treatment of homosexuals in the concentration camps is insufficiently clear in the film. I think that using the swooningly elegiac adagietto of Mahler’s 5th Symphony to accompany the images of crackdown followed by shots of the slave labor at the edge of a sugarcane field burning photogenically prettifies the concentration camps. (Besides, the Mahler adagietto is as associated with “Death in Venice” as “Thus Sprach Zarathustra” is with �.” I don’t think that it is available for new associations.) In contrast overdubbing the walk along the seashore with Lou Reed’s woozy “Rouge” (played by Laurie Anderson) works perfectly.
But, as I have said, I think this is a great film of a great book. Schnabel has downplayed the sexual graphicness of the book, but as important as pursuing sex was to Arenas, freedom was what he most ardently sought. He had to write and he had to write the way his way. If the film did nothing other than show this compellingly, it would be worthy. It does that and much more.
DVD features
I haven't played the comment tracks yet. The transfer is excellent, the bonus features and original theatrical trailer are interesting, and subtitling (English, Spanish, or French) is very useful. (The film may be played entirely in Spanish or in the alernation of Spanish and Spanish-accented English of the film in release in the US.)T
he most interesting of he extra features is a seven and a half minute extract from "Improprer Conduct," a documentary about the Castro regime's persecution of intellectuals and homosexuals. Although Bardem is a bit bulkier than Arenas, the resemblance between them is striking. Arenas begins in French, then is overdubbed with some description of who he is, and picks up in Spanish.
There is a behind-the-scenes "home movie" of equal length about the making the film, shot by Schnabel's daughter, Lola. The highlight is Bardem kidding Schnabel for crying (not in frustration at not getting what he wanted, but being moved by getting more than he could have asked from the actor).
The longest (as long as the other two combined) and least interesting feature is titled "Little Notes on Painting," shot in Schnabel's New York City studio (formerly a perfume factory). He comments superficially on a number of the large canvasses, some of which he has workmen move around (moving pictures, you know? Well, my opinion is that he is better at making moving pictures than still ones). The paintings are very large.There are none with the infamous broken plates, but there is asphalt and gravel adhering from dragging the paintings on roads.
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