beforenightfalls

REVIEW

A startlingly colorful and evocative
journey to Cuba in the sixties based on
gay writer/dissident Reinaldo Arenas'
posthumously published memoir.

Julian Schnabel's (Basquiat) new film is
the story of a gay Cuban poet whose
life was too big for a Revolutionary
anti-art Cuba. The film takes in a life
that starts in the Cuban countryside, a
violent and ignorant home from which
Reinaldo fled at an early age to
University life in Havana and from
there to Miami and New York. In
Havana he met and consorted with
artists, writers and fellow homosexuals,
developing an anti-Castro mentality
that would get him sent to prison later.
Arenas boasts of over 5,000 sexual
contacts in his Havana years!
(unfortunately we are treated to only a
few of these encounters). Arenas
hangs out at the beach and seems
driven to water, perhaps as
preparation for his dramatic escape by
water from jail and his eventual
participation in the boat-lift from Cuba
of homosexuals, artists and other
"deviants". The days in Cuba are
filmed with a vibrant color palate and a
fabulous score by Laurie Anderson
and Lou Reed, both of which evoke an
old Cuba marvelously.

This film is no picnic - Arenas was in
prison several times, and there are
scenes of the intense degradation of
solitude. Johnny Depp's appearances
as the drag queen Bon Bon and also
remarkably as the prison warden, a
fiercely sexy Latino man, bring
laughter to these dark scenes. After
prison Arenas is sent on a boatlift to
the US where he spent a number of
years writing and having wild sex in a
New York that was free of the
repressive Castro regime he fled.
These years are unfortunately
condensed into a few minutes of sad
and intense film as Arenas succumbs
to AIDS and is cared for by the
beautiful and sweet Herberto (Wincott).
This moving film offers something for
both gay men and film-lovers.
Bardem's acting is extraordinary, the
direction, art and music are all bold
and compelling -and there's plenty of
eye-candy in this high-profile gay flick.
(In English and Spanish with subtitles)