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Before Night Falls****

Having recently suffered through Shadow of the Vampire, I approached another biographical movie based upon the life of a "real" artist with some trepidation. Before Night Falls cannot be called the exact opposite of E. Elias Merhige's monstrosity, but Julian Schnabel's new film with Javier Bardem in the leading role certainly provides a striking contrast to it. The postmodernism which the one director works so hard to affect comes spontaneously to the other. 

In fact, the protagonist of Before Night Falls is as much an elective representative of the late twentieth century artist as Schnabel himself. The Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, suffering from AIDS, committed suicide in New York in the 1990s after fleeing from his homeland following years of persecution for a variety of supposed offenses--among them for being homosexual and for refusing to conform his writing to the dictates of a totalitarian regime.

The screenplay, by Schnabel, Cunningham O'Keefe and Lázaro Gómez Cariles is based upon Arenas' autobiography. However, Schnabel, in a statement posted on the movie's Web site, states that "The film is not only an interpretation of Reinaldo's autobiography...but combines images from his other writings The Hallucinations, The Parade Ends, The Color of Summer and stories from his longtime friend Lázaro Gómez Cariles." 

With the conspicuous exception of its handling of dialogue, the screenplay is quite inventive, especially when it unobtrusively shifts from fact into subjective fantasy--and here the contrast between the restraint of When Night Falls and the riot of Shadow of the Vampire is blatant. A particularly notable use of this device occurs when Arenas, at that moment an inmate of Morro prison, is interrogated by Lieutenant Victor (Johnny Depp), an incident with strong reminiscences of Jean Genet's novel Funeral Rites and his film Un Chant d'Amour.

In fact, one of these borrowings provides an almost perfect contrast to Shadow of the Vampire's ill-conceived exercise in bringing Nosferatu back from the dead. This occurs when the Lieutenant--in a repetition of one of the most famous shots from Un Chant d'Amour--forces Arenas to take the former's revolver in his mouth. In contrast to Merhige's painfully self-conscious, arty attempts to reproduce the visual style of Murnau's film, this moment fits seamlessly into the dramatic context of the episode. Like a subtle allusion in a great poem, the reference will heighten the experience of watching the movie for  viewers who recognize it, but not interfere with the experience for those who don't.  

Before Night Falls is one of the most aggressively willful motion pictures I have seen for a long time. During most of the picture, Schnabel makes an extensive use of emphatically hand-held cinematography--by Xavier Perez Robet and Guillermo Rosas--giving the movie a nervous, edgy quality from beginning to end--as if the director were using the camera as a brush and painting with broadly deliberate strokes--in spite of the rather slow pace at which the action unfolds. Yet not surprisingly, the painter/director has an eye for striking compositions, and at times he stops to slowly explore some detail of the setting. 

The most effective caesura of this kind occurs after an attempt by Arenas' ex-lover, Pepe Morales (Andrea Di Stefano) to flee Cuba in a balloon, an attempt that ends in disaster when the craft and its passenger crash to earth. Schnabel allows the image of the ill-fated balloon as it billows in the wind  to remain on screen for some time, a  terrifying period to the episode, marking the end of this abortive attempt to simultaneously overcome  the laws of Cuba and those of gravity far more more effectively than a lot of fancy cutting ever could have. 

But these moments of repose are only interludes that do not last for long. Unlike Cast Away, Before Night Falls is not constructed according to a principle of classical equilibrium, but according to what might be characterized as a principle of incessantly re/vising what has gone on before. In a dizzying shift of perspectives, Schnabel relentlessly propels the action forward in a rush of images whose turbulence counterpoints the violent course of Arenas'  life. Woe be to anyone foolhardy enough to imagine he or she has captured the secret of this movie before the "End" titles flashes on the screen!

Before Night Falls is as polarized between art and politics as was Arenas' own career. On the one hand, the movie is a virulent attack on the Castro regime. Unlike Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Before Night Falls is no story about the revolution betrayed but one which depicts the Cuban leader and his cohorts as bad guys from the first time they show up--and they just get worse as the action progresses. Moreover, the narrow concentration upon a single character gives the film a suffocating intensity which powerfully conveys the experience of living in a police state. But the film loads the dice by completely pulling the whole drama of Castro's rise to power out of any meaningful historical or political context.

In Schnabel's movie, Cuba is an island dystopia whose specific location is as hazy as that of any traditional utopia. Not only does Before Night Falls pass over in silence the repression of the Batista years and the extent of American influence in Cuba before the revolution, but it also says nothing about the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, events which must have had quite an impact on the life of Arenas, however indifferent he may have been to politics, just as they must have had quite an impact on the lives of most Cuban citizens who could only see themselves as hostages in the struggle between two superpowers. 

Nor will it do to plead that the film is about art rather than politics. Before Night Falls is one of the most highly politicized motion pictures to have come along for many years, especially for a commercially produced American motion picture. Only in a period as deeply reactionary as the present one, in which anyone who believes in the possibility of a better world than the one that "hatched Auschwitz"--in a memorable phrase of Theodor Adorno's--is vilified as the public enemy, could this fact go by unnoticed.

Schnabel has far more luck in dealing with Arenas as an artist than he has dealing with him as a dissenter. In the central portion of the film, he resuscitates the Romantic myth of the artist as hero--or more specifically, that of the artist as martyr--and for a moment I feared Before Night Falls was going to turn into a series of chromolitho picture postcard views of the Life of a Great Genius, punctuated by snatches of Mahler and angelic voices on the soundtrack. But the film corrects that deceptive impression  as it progresses, especially in the last section after Arenas comes to New York.

It would be misleading to say that Arenas finds out that things are no better here than in Cuba. In effect, exile eliminates Arenas' chance at martyrdom. If the Cubans had taken him out, stood him up in front of a wall facing a firing squad, and executed him, he would have immediately become a hero to the refugee community and the American cultural right wing--his gayness notwithstanding. In New York, he is just another nameless soul dying of AIDS. Arenas comments that under socialism if someone is kicked in the butt by the state, the victim is supposed to be grateful, but that under capitalism it's possible to scream. Yet what guarantees that anyone will hear that scream?

The outdated image of the artist as hero/martyr gives away to the truer one of the artist as a permanently displaced person. Schnabel does not carry his demythologization as far Ingmar Bergman did in Hour of the Wolf (1968), depicting the artist as the destined prey of art-loving predators, but the concluding section of Before Night Falls radically alters the viewer's perception of what has gone on before. And the movie marks this transformation by a corresponding shift in visual style: the bright hues of the Cuban scenes give way  to grainy blues and grays, while shaky, tightly framed compositions--sometimes recalling those of an early Cassavetes movie or even of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls--supplant the wide vistas of the scenes on the island.

What makes the film so ultimately compelling is Schnabel's refusal to avert his gaze from following the trajectory of Arenas' final disintegration. If Before Night Falls had ended at the moment the protagonist departed from Cuba, the film would have been fatally compromised. Schnabel may not elevate Arenas to sainthood but neither does he sacrifice him to the demands of ideology. At the end, "the rest is silence", and the words of a great poet are the only legacy to bear away--like T.S. Eliot's "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" at the end of The Waste Land.

It is not so long ago that I praised Steven Soderbergh for having chosen to use Spanish dialogue subtitled in English in Traffic. Before Night Falls is the proof a contrario of the wisdom of this decision, since Schnabel has chosen to go in for a babble of English and Spanish. On Cuba, the characters mainly speak English in most scenes following ye olde Hollywood tradition, but some of them illogically shift to Spanish at dramatically intense moments. Even more maddening, however praiseworthy on artistic grounds, is the decision to have Javier Bardem recite some of Arenas' poems in Spanish in a voice over. But what sense is this suppose to make? I am more than ready to make a generous allowance for the willing suspension of disbelief, but is the audience supposed to believe that Arenas spoke one language and wrote in another? 

Javier Bardem gives an extraordinary performance as Reinaldo Arenas, and I am very happy that he has received an Academy Award nomination as best actor. But what are the members supposed to base their voting on? Whenever Bardem speaks English he does so with audible difficulty, so much so that I had real difficulty in following the dialogue at times. It was bad enough in older American movies to hear Anglos speak with what they fancied to be a Spanish accent, but forcing a performer whose native language is not English to recite fairly demanding lines in that language has the effect of making the guy sound like a hick--and the effect only becomes more jarring when Bardem is allowed to speak in Spanish, which he does with beautiful fluency.

If Before Night Falls were no more than a propaganda piece, its confusion of tongues might rate as a minor fault, but in a movie whose central character is a poet such a fault betrays an appalling lack of sensitivity to the material. Nevertheless, the film rightly makes Arenas' obsession with writing its dramatic focus, and in this way it strikingly overlaps with Quills' more drastically graphic depiction of the Marquis de Sade's struggle to continue writing at whatever cost.

Several years ago I recall having read about a beach volleyball player who sported a tattoo bearing the message "Rage Is a Gift." It would take the tragic genius of Sophocles or Euripides, I think, to explore in depth the implications of this boast, but chances are they would have viewed such a gift as a curse sent by the gods to poison the life of mortals. Yet who could fail to see the creative rage lying behind the work of Sade or Arenas? A rage not only of language, but against language, against the degradation of language to the purposes of conformity and ideological manipulation. Tyrants of whatever stripe certainly do right to fear such a rage as a dangerous fire that could turn into a conflagration and utterly devastate their flimsy empires.

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Traffic  Quills  Dr. T and the Women  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

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