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BEFORE NIGHT FALLS Send This Review to a Friend
Director Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls," showcased at the New York Film Festival, is a harrowing recounting of the life of Cuban dissident writer and homosexual Reinaldo Arenas, played brilliantly and movingly by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. The viewpoint is vigorously anti-Castro and makes no allowances for anything good that exists under the Castro regime, but the imprisonment of dissidents and gays in Cuba has been documented, and therefore needs to be exposed, as Schnabel does with his passionate drama that follows Arenas in his effort to get his writing out to the world and to personally find peace.
Early sympathies for the revolution on the part of Arenas, who grew up in poverty, turned sour in the face of persecution of gays, although the film makes no reference to how gays may have been treated under the previous Batista regime. The situation is compounded by persecution of rebellious writers, and Arenas was compelled to smuggle his works out of prison in order to get recognition and be sure that his writing was not suppressed.
There is a tense scene when Arenas joins the 1980 Mariel boatlift when Castro allowed thousands of so-called undesirables to leave for the United States. But Arenas was not to find the happiness he sought. Schanbel's film follows his fate in New York as the writer becomes ill with AIDS, and there are touching moments with his companion, who helps ease his way to suicide.
One casting highlight is Johnny Depp, who plays two roles, the most flamboyant of which is a transvestite. He also doubles as a prison guard. Others in the cast include Andrea di Stefano, Olivier Martinez, Michael Wincott and Sean Penn. Schnabel, who was acclaimed for his film "Basquiat," is also well known as an artist, and together with directors of photography Xavier Perez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas, he brings visual as well as dramatic strength to this painful tale of endurance and tragedy. A Grandview Pictures release.
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