Before Night Falls film review

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BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

Javier Bardem was the deserved recipient of an Academy Award nomination this year for his portrayal of the exiled Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Based on Arenas' memoirs of oppression in Castro's Cuba and directed by the former darling of the art world, Julian Schnabel (whose previous film was another artistic biography, Basquiat), this is a poignant if at times slow-moving film.

It’s the classic tale of the artist's struggle in the face of tyranny. Even from an early age in the peasant Cuban backwaters, the young Arenas is chastised by his father when he announces his desire to be a poet. His adult struggle is dominated by the fact that revolutionary Cuba is no place for overt homosexuals and his eventual imprisonment and escape to the United States in a rubber tire forms the main plot of the film.

Schnabel is very much at pains to place the author's troubles within the context of the historical situation. As a boy, Arenas decides to run off and join the revolutionaries (despite being dissuaded by an itinerant traveller, an unlikely cameo by Sean Penn). There is plenty of footage of the real-life events of the time, and Godard-like, the director persistently uses title frames to explain the action. The varied styles, film stocks and musical montages used to depict the story give the film a mosaic-like feel.

Arenas discovers two things in his teens: that he is homosexual and that he has a gift for writing. While his literary efforts are encouraged, his sexuality is very much frowned upon and eventually he is imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of molestation. Perversely, despite being incarcerated in a Havana hellhole, Arenas has some of the happiest moments of his life in jail. Being the only literate prisoner, he spends much of his time writing letters for his fellow inmates, and he finds a group of gay convicts who are willing to help him smuggle his books to the outside world. As a cross-dressing prisoner who, Papillon-like, hides Arenas' scripts where the sun doesn't shine, Johnny Depp offers another bizarre cameo performance.

If all of this sounds very grim, then that's because it is. There are few moments of light relief in the film and it does at times veer towards being too worthy for its own good.