Julian Schnabel made his name as a ”neo-expressionist” painter during the Eighties, when that form of highly charged canvas experienced a brief revival. His most memorable works were images splashed over huge areas covered with shattered crockery – a rather original way of providing the work with some extra texture.
Schnabel gives some extra texture to the art of the cinema, too, having become a film-maker in 1996 with his biopic of the half-Haitian half-Puerto-Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose intense, busy, idiosyncratic paintings brought something genuinely new to the medium. He was also a hellraiser who died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 27, blasted by success as much as by his personal demons.
With his second film, Before Night Falls (winner of the best film award at the Venice Film Festival), Schnabel has made another biopic of an outsider figure, another creative person who struggled fearsomely (how expressionist!) to realise his inner visions, whose art blurs into his life, and who suffers for both. This time Schnabel’s protagonist is the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, an outsider because of his illegitimacy, his childhood in poverty-stricken rural Cuba – and because he was a homosexual under Fidel Castro’s fulsomely macho communist regime.
Arenas’s battle was different to Basquiat’s in that it was against an oppressor less subtle than the condescending New York art world. As a teenager, Arenas ran away to join Castro and Che Guevara’s revolution, only to be betrayed by that revolution when it declared homosexuals dangerous agents of moral rot, ”anti-social elements’ who were a ‘by-product of capitalism” and therefore had to be
expunged from the proud new nation.
As we have seen in movies like the marvellous Cuban film Fresa y Chocolate, though, it wasn’t always quite as efficiently Stalinist as that. Yes, there were round-ups of gay men who were sent to labour camps, there were show trials in which men were forced to sell out their friends and lovers, but there were also gaps in the social fabric that allowed for some expression of such desires. There was enough corruption to ensure that the associates of the powerful got away with their deviance for some of the time, though, as Before Night Falls shows, they could also end up imprisoned or ”later, and marginally better” expelled from the socialist paradise.
A brilliant scene in Before Night Falls depicts Arenas applying for the right to leave Cuba after Castro, in a fit of magnanimity in 1980, decided that homosexuals and other undesirables might as well bugger off. To prove he’s gay, the burly Arenas has to mince around and wag his bum like a cheap whore for the passport officials ‘ and we are reminded how much the outer signs of homosexuality are constructed by particular social quirks, how arbitrary such categories are, and thus how willed the consequent persecution has to be.
Spanish actor Javier Bardem (who exploded on to the screen in Bigas Luna’s JamónJamón and was seen recently in Second Skin) is luminiously moving as Arenas, a man who cannot be other than what he is, and who cannot stop
expressing himself through his writing, even if it has to be smuggled out of his homeland to be published ‘ and even if that means more persecution. In a performance justly nominated for an Oscar, insofar as the Oscars are ever just, and the winner of the best actor prize at Venice, Bardem gives us Arenas’s feline sensuality, his drive to write, his courage and his cowardice. What’s missing is a fuller sense of Arenas’s writings, and of the extent of his sexuality – after all, this was a man who said he’d had some 5 000 lovers by the age of 25. But that’s not Bardem’s fault; perhaps the (straight) director thought it might diminish the audience’s sympathies for Arenas.
Bardem is the centre of the film, and without him the whole would not hold, but he is given very able support by the rest of the cast, particularly Olivier Martinez and Andrea di Stefano ‘ and Johnny Depp, who has two small, surprising cameos. One is as a jailer after whom, in a scene worthy of Jean Genet, Arenas lusts. The other is as a flouncing transvestite with an extraordinary capacity for moving contraband – a role that redeems his self-satisfied turn in Chocolat.
Cinematographically, Before Night Falls has an edgy, on-the-run quality, with grainy images and saturated colours that beautifully suggest both the horrors of Arenas’s life and the textured decay of Cuba’s cityscapes – as well as heat, the heat of a subtropical place and the heat of passions burning beneath a stultifying sociopolitical unease. And the irreducible drives of the writer whose passion we have now witnessed.