Before Night Falls

Having debuted with the multi-acclaimed Basquiat, Before Night Falls marks a radical departure from the intimacy of Julien Schnabel’s first film, into the realms of the kind of quasi-mystical beauty not witnessed on screen since Kundun. It’s a shift which befits the subject matter of Schnabel’s second foray into the art-biopic genre – the Cuban writer Reinaldo Areas, here played to stunning effect by Almadovar regular Javier Bardem.

Plot: as a youngster, Arenas is emboldened by the promises of the Castro revolution, and having moved from a Cuban backwater to giddy post-revolutionary Havana, with its echoes of the decadence of the Weimar republic, life seems idyllic. Arenas works in the national library by day, and parties extremely hard every night. His writing aspirations, however, become compromised as this particular paradise is lost when the Cuban government cracks down on ‘counter-revolutionaries’.

Writers and gays are among the dissenter groups identified, making Arenas doubly susceptible to persecution, and he finds himelf imprisoned. Still determined to fight the good fight against censorship and oppression, Arenas continues writing amidst brutality and botched escape attempts, until he’s deported to the US with other dissidents.

The land of the free brings still more sorrows: a bohemian yet impoverished existence, and ultimately AIDS. Though such a litany of hardships and tragedies might be expected to make for grim viewing, Schnabel remarkably manages to find humour and humanity at every turn, and the film incorporates material both from Arenas’ own 1993 memoir and from his poetry, enabling Before Night Falls to encapsulate the artist’s work as well as the artist himself, with the aid of accompanying hallucinogenic dream sequences.

This is a richly textured affair, dispensing with conventional chronology and narrative in favour of thematic links, and this somnambulist quality even allows the film to get away with what would otherwise be jarring celebrity cameos from Sean Penn and Johnny Depp.

Unquestionably, though, Bardem is the star of the show. Unrecognisable from his collaborations with Almadovar, in which he’s generally cast as the ‘hunk’, here his demeanour is slight and effeminate. It’s a warm and generous performance, which lends the film the sort of emotional sweep last encountered in Boys Don’t Cry.

Nominated for an Oscar, Bardem should have won the thing, and almost certainly would have if Russell Crowe hadn’t had the legs for that toga.

Stirring stuff.