Before Night Falls
by Julian Schnabel
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VHS Tape Cover Information
Actor: Giovanni Florido, Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Lol? Navarro, Olatz L?pez GarmendiaDirector: Julian Schnabel
Producer: Julian Schnabel
Writer: Julian Schnabel
Producer: Jon Kilik
Writer: Cunningham O'Keefe
Writer: Jana Bokova
Writer: L?zaro G?mez Carriles
Writer: Reynaldo Arenas
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); Russian (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Original recording reissued
Running Time: 133 minutes
Release Date: 2001-10-02
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: New Line Home Video
Studio: New Line Home Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Before Night Falls
Movie Review: Struggle against repression
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an artistic and visually bold film about the life of a gay talented poet and writer in the time of the Cuban Revolution. Javier Bardem is excellent as poet Reinaldo Arenas, a peasant child who becomes one of Cuba's great writers. The film takes us from the first days of the Cuban revolution to the dark days of totalitarian repression of all sexuality and creativity that is not condoned by the state.
This is an excellent film, visually compelling with a narrative flow that is not smooth or consistent, but totally engaging all the same. The film artfully and entertainingly deals with the concept of whether and how the work of the artist and the actual life of the artist and then the later artistic depiction of the life of the artist are integrated. Schnabel does an excellent job of taking on this challenge, revealing the passages in the life of the artist that impact his work. Reinaldo Arenas made art from his life experiences but was able to maintain a surreal and absurdist aspect to the writing. Schnabel does this perfectly with his short collage like film-making, that is almost dream like with its entrances and exits of characters with little introduction or resolution. At first I thought this was a weakness of the film. Why were so many handsome men coming into Arenas' life and then leaving his life? Why were so many artists and writers his friends and allies and then they disappear? The more I thought about the film the more it became evident to me that this is the nature of both homosexuality and homosexual relationships as well as the voice of dissident artists in a repressive totalitarian dictatorship. This is terror indeed if we are afraid to know the names of our lovers or of our fellow sympathizers for fear that we will be turned in by them or forced to reveal their names. In the end the film is a great achievement in the ability to depict repression and the human forces that resist it.
Summary of Before Night Falls
Based on the posthumously published memoir by Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls is artist-director Julian Schnabel's second exercise in artist biography, but where Schnabel's earlier film Basquiat was relatively conventional, this film is bolder in both style and execution. Schnabel is perhaps too enamored of his subject as a noble martyr, lending the film a somewhat inflated sense of importance. Still, it's rare to see an artist's life and work so elegantly interwoven, and Before Night Falls uses all of Arenas's life as its canvas, from impoverished youth to lively gay freedom in mid-1950's Cuba; imprisonment during Castro's antigay regime; and to New York City in 1980, followed by Arenas's battle with AIDS and subsequent suicide (depicted here as assisted) in 1990.Through these extreme rises and falls, Arenas is always writing, his typewriter his most faithful lover and weapon (by way of smuggled manuscripts) against the dark forces that surround him. As Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, Arenas is "a serious actor's dream role: to be a gay Jesus in a modern Passion Play," and Javier Bardem--the first Spanish actor to receive an Oscar nomination--inhabits the role with subtle ferocity, charting this emotional odyssey with outer reserve but blazing infernos of internal passion. And while Schnabel suffers from a hyperactive camera, there's poetry here--visual, dramatic, and literal--and vibrant humor to temper the deep tragedy of Arenas's life. Schnabel also uses his actor friends to good advantage: a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn adds an ironic touch to his brief appearance as a peasant, and Johnny Depp is both funny and fearsome in dual roles as a drag queen and vicious army interrogator. --Jeff Shannon
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