BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

6/10

USA 2000
director : Julian Schnabel
script : Schnabel, Cunningham O’Keefe, Lazaro Gomez Carriles (based on book by Reinaldo Arenas)
cinematography : Xavier Perez Grobet
editing : Michael Berenbaum
music : Carter Burwell (additional : Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson)
lead actors : Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea di Stefano, Johnny Depp
132 minutes

Arthouse hype is a terrible thing – add Before Night Falls to Audition, Yi Yi, Amores Perros and Songs From The Second Floor, to the recent list of watchable, unremarkable cinematic geese hailed as unmissable swans. It’s as if  the public will stay away from foreign movies unless they’re billed as dazzling works of genius. Blame the snowball effect: a few well-received festival screenings here, a few awards there, a few critical raves, and before you know it everything’s out of control. In the blind rush to acclaim the latest highbrow wonder, subtler and quieter works of genuine talent – like Tom Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior  – can get unjustly overlooked.

According to critics cited on the posters, Before Night Falls is one of the films of the year, with the a central performance to match: Javier Bardem as persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Bardem’s Oscar nomination, we’re told, was no fluke – “he should have won!” Well, steady on. It’s a great role, and a good performance, no doubt about that (if only for the poignant optimism of his every “Hello”).  But the best of the year – have they seen You Can Count On Me’s Mark Ruffalo?  Chopper’s Eric Bana? Harry, Un Ami’s Sergi Lopez?

Likewise the movie: an episodic, occasionally moving, well-intentioned biopic, nicely photographed and scored, with solid performances. But it doesn’t do anybody any good at all to raise expectations which, for most viewers, the movie won’t deliver. A great director like Andrei Tarkovsky (in Mirror) can blend invididual biography with wider-ranging socio-political history, and make it look easy. It isn’t. Some Night critics seem to have been dazzled by the names involved, the ‘serious’ political/sexual subject matter, the (occasional) subtitles. There are middle-of-the-road, average arthouse pictures, just as in the multiplexes, and this is one of them.

Before Night Falls is, fundamentally, a cockamamey movie. A giveaway : the dialogue alternates, for no good reason, between heavily-accented English and subtitled Spanish – when characters get excited, they veer from the former to the latter. Can’t the audiences be trusted to just read the subtitles? This perhaps wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t so often difficult to make out what Bardem’s saying in his copious voice-overs.

Director Schnabel’s previous picture was Basquiat, in which an excellent central performance from Jeffrey Wright was all but wrecked by Schnabel’s determination to surround him with the director’s showbiz pals. Likewise here, early on, Sean Penn’s cameo as a Cuban peasant, destabilising what’s supposedly a harrowing/uplifting account of Arenas’s childhood.

And just as we’re settling into the rhythms of Arenas’s adult struggles, up pops Johnny Depp! Not once but twice, first as a transvestite prison inmate, then as a straight-laced military officer, stroking his cock through his uniform pants. It’s gimmick casting of the worst kind, undermining the seriousness of the story and emphasising the shortcomings of both director and script.

We never get a particularly clear idea of the exact nature of Arenas’s persecution in Cuba, for instance – one minute he’s lounging on the beach, openly homosexual, joking with his (confusingly undifferentiated) pals. The next he’s been arrested, then almost immediately he’s on the run. Before too long, he’s back in prison, and ends up for a spell in solitary confinement – the small cell is especially constricting, given Bardem’s bull-like muscular frame. But we never see Arenas working out, or even working, or playing sport – when did he get so big?

There are plenty of these gaps and inconsistencies, as Before Night Falls succumbs to the choppiness that afflicts so many biopics. The end of the picture is especially uneven, charting Arenas’ rapidly decline from AIDS in the New York flat he shares with fellow-exile Lazaro (Martinez). It’s never clear, however, if their relationship is physical or not – typical of a picture that’s strangely coy about showing the physical side of Arenas’s love life, the camera often, demurely and frustratingly, panning away to film walls. One suspects that the free-spirited real Reinaldo would, at best, be baffled by this approach.

by Neil Young

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