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.
Other
Recent Reviews:
Traffic
Quills
Dr. T and the Women
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Vertical
Limit
Shadow
of the Vampire
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net