Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea di Stefano, Michael Wincott, Johnny Depp

The rise of Fidel Castro and the fallout of the Cuban revolution have provided one of the richest stories of the twentieth century, inspiring some of our greatest writers and filmmakers to delve into the turmoil of the island only ninety miles off the Florida coast. Amongst all the missile crises and Bay of Pigs fiascos, however, there was a human revolution in Cuba, and a sexual revolution, which have largely gone untold outside its borders.

‘Before Night Falls’ is based on the memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas, one of Cuba’s most talented poets of recent times. It is the story of his journey from poverty to revolutionary to reluctant dissident and aging queen, watching the revolution for which he fought turn against him to such an extent that his books needed to be smuggled out of the country for publication.

The quiet sexual revolution of the 1960s, of which Arenas was a proud instigator, meant that he and his close-knit group of artists and friends were free to listen to Jacques Brel and bathe together in tight Speedos, but Castro’s regime is a violently homophobic one, and when the crackdown came, it came hard. The country, so rich in colour and inspiration, became a prison from which all attempts to escape ended in abject failure.

Javier Bardem’s performance, taking Arenas from a young optimistic library attendant to a dejected, persecuted ex-revolutionary poet wasting away from AIDS in a New York apartment building, is absolutely superlative, and more than deserving of the Oscar nomination which he garnered for his first major English language role. In fact, one wonders how Russell Crowe’s multi-faceted performance as a grumpy Gladiator could have even be considered in the same league as Bardem’s powerful, natural work here.

Films about dissident poets in communist countries can tend to be both pretentious and dull, but ‘Before Night Falls’ pulses with the rhythms of a Cuba gripped by the feverish optimism of the early days of Socialism. It is wickedly funny, and is not afraid to stoop to the occasional Farrelly Brothers gag to show how Arenas’ work is smuggled from prison. It is, ultimately, about the uneasy relationship between art and revolutionary politics, and the realisation that ebeautiful things have no place in a dictatorship’.

Director Julian Schnabel’s last film was the underrated ‘Basquiat’, another story of the tragedy of contemporary artists — Schnabel himself was part of a New York scene around which these people all gravitated, and it would not be surprising if he knew Arenas in his last days. But ‘Before Night Falls’ is a much more mature work than ‘Basquiat’, on a much broader scale. Salvador Parra’s wonderful production design, from Arenas’ childhood rural life to the nightclubs of Havana and decaying underground hideouts for persecuted souls, complements Schnabel’s compelling visual style, creating a world that brings us somewhat closer to understanding the people on the other side of a battle with America that almost brought the world to its knees.

Although ‘Before Night Falls’ could have done with some tighter editing to get it through its forty-year time span in a more spritely manner, and possibly unnecessary cameos from Sean Penn and Johnny Depp detract from the heart of the story, it is a bold, broad and hugely enjoyable journey, intent on capturing the poetry in Arenas’ own writings.

Arenas, guilty of nothing more than what he called his two edelicious vices’, writing and homosexuality, lived an outspoken, persecuted life, tainted with as much misery as it was blessed by talent. Schnabel’s film is testament to an amazing voice, and an amazing country, for too long misunderstood.