Before Night Falls (2000)

by Alicia Kennedy

Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel’s film about the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, is a gift to my sensibilities. Taking it in feels indulgent: a writer I love portrayed by an actor (Javier Bardem) whom I’d watch read the paper, directed by the man who made Basquiat, a movie I watched almost weekly in high school.

Arenas was introduced to me in the last Spanish class I had to take in college when the professor had us read “Con Los Ojos Cerrados”. It’s a story about a child whose imagination is his savior, but also lands him in the hospital. There is so much humor in this little story—and no condescension. This was the first time I read the perspective of a child treated with respect, as legitimate. Reading it was like encountering the child I once was—the child who wandered her yard singing made-up songs, who climbed trees to spy on the neighbors—again. And so I fell in love with Arenas and read everything I could. He’s essential to my life as a reader and wishful writer; this movie based on his memoir did not need to be so good in order for me to love it, but it is so good that it stands up as a brilliant piece of art whether you’ve read his writing or not.

Schnabel made such a feat possible by holding on to Arenas’s humor and not attempting a play-by-play dramatization of the book. There is none of the undue solemnity characteristic of most biopics; his life was dramatic enough. Arenas was born in Cuba’s rural Oriente province in 1943 and joined with Castro’s rebels as a teenager. Under Castro, he was persecuted and put in jail for being gay and writing “counterrevolutionary propaganda.” Friends smuggled his work out of the country until he was allowed to leave as part of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980. He lived in New York until killing himself—before AIDS could—in 1990.

All of this is depicted in the film, but in a non-explicit, sensual way that respects the primacy of his writing. Schnabel uses Arenas’s prose poems “The Parade Begins” and “The Parade Ends” to bookend his experience of Castro’s regime. The first, about the excitement in the streets at the start of the revolution, is read by Bardem over documentary footage of Castro’s success. In one of the final scenes, “The Parade Ends,” about the revolution’s aftermath and the transcendence of writing, is read as Arenas is going home to his small apartment in New York from the hospital. Scenes of Arenas at his typewriter, where he sat sweating “like a dedicated performer at his piano,” are as important as the beach bathroom trysts and the torment of his years in jail.

But this movie can’t be explained; it needs to be seen and heard! The cinematography and music work with the film’s content like the carefully executed line breaks and punctuation of a poem to create an immersive portrait. Visually, it is all textured blues, browns, and greens—earthy colors rendered so richly that you feel like you’re looking at a painting (Schnabel is most famously known as a painter, which clearly helps). Carter Burwell’s score and the use of classic Cuban music are essential to creating an atmosphere that is of both the film’s real-life setting and the subjective reality of the work itself. In the DVD commentary, Burwell talks about using chords that are missing parts so that the music doesn’t feel distinctly happy or sad, but creates a tension and confusion between the two modes. He likens it to medieval music and Gregorian chant, giving Arenas’s struggle for freedom the desperate and uncertain tinge of a religious journey.

And there is so much more: the wordless nightclub scene over which Lou Reed’s “Rouge” plays; Bardem’s ability to carry his strength so gracefully (his perfect performance overall—he was robbed of Best Actor); the party of bohemians in a dilapidated mansion the night a hot-air balloon escape through a hole in the roof is planned. It is a true marriage of the literary and the cinematic, which is what I guess I’d been waiting for in a movie—just like the wit and magic of Arenas were what I’d been waiting for in a writer. Like I said: a gift to my sensibilities.

Alicia Kennedy is a reader who writes sometimes. She tumbls here.