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Before night falls charts all 47 years in the life of gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. The film features a deep and wonderful performance by Javier Bardem, who at this years Oscars, was nominated as best actor for this role. The movie arrives laden with critical acclaim, numerous press awards, and in addition to the Oscar nomination, a best actor award for Bardem at this years Venice Film Festival.
The film gives an honest account of Arenas’s life and times - the story told being a dark and difficult one. Arenas was born in 1943 to an impoverished single mother. He displayed a talent for writing from an early age, something which was not in fitting with Cuban macho culture. Eventually, a young and idealistic Reinaldo ran away from home to participate in the 1958 revolution. The film shows us that Arenas was attracted to men from an early age, but this element to the story comes to fore after the writer has begun studying at university.
The entire movie is told against the backdrop of social and political developments in Cuba over the same period. Following the revolution of 1958, Fidel Castro and a communist regime took over. However one of the beliefs of the communist rulers was that art idealised beauty, and that beauty was incompatible with the goals of communism because it caused people to dream – and dreaming could not be tolerated! For this reason, art was heavily censored, and suddenly Arenas found that his work could not be published in Cuba. Around the same time, the Cuban administration began a campaign to rid the country of undesirables, people who were ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘uncommitted’. Of course homosexuals fell into this category along with political dissidents and petty criminals. This development obviously has massive consequences for gay people in Cuban society, including Arenas, who were routinely rounded up and tried at kangaroo courts before being sentenced to long and arduous prison sentences.
The pain suffered by people as a result of this repression is shown in all its awful reality. The wife of one man, who has been charged with being gay and is forced on national television to confess to his crimes, kills herself by jumping out a window. Public Rallies denouncing gays are shown to have received popular support, and the environment of official hostility towards gays was exploited by ordinary people, who in one scene, had Arenas arrested by alleging that he had molested them.
Bardem’s performance is exceptional. Initially, his mannerisms appear a little forced, but as the movie progresses, you begin to notice these less, and the complex person that was Arenas comes vividly to life. Ultimately Bardem's is a very believable portrait of a sensitive but resilient artist, living under extreme pressure. In addition there are some wonderful cameos by Sean Penn, and a double turn by Johnny Depp as a glamorous transvestite and a cruel prison sergeant.
Much of the dialogue is in Spanish and French, and all the English is spoken with strong Spanish accents, making it at times difficult to follow. Developments in the plot aren’t always very clearly explained, leaving the viewer guessing at where the film is going – this is nowhere more obvious than in the closing quarter hour of the movie.
Ultimately this film provides a timely reminder of some of the harsh realities of what Cuba has really been like for over the last 43 years. This movie provides the perfect anti-dote to the recent Cuban revival which often glosses over the human rights abuses which occurred and paints the revolution in exclusively positive tones. The emergence of Cuba as an epi-centre of cool has come about through amongst other things, the success of the Buena Vista social club, and the advocacy of politically conscious bands such as the Manic Street Preachers. Admittedly there have been successes in the Cuban system (their education and health systems are some of the best in the world despite lacking financial resources), however it is difficult to endorse any system which allows such terrible abuses of human rights. Clearly many of the people of Cuba paid dearly for the pursuit of the ‘common good’.
Before night falls is a harrowing account of one mans struggle. If one ever needs reminding of the adversity which gays have faced past and present, then this movie will do the job. This movie is demanding, hard hitting, unrelenting and an emotionally draining experience for the viewer. While it does show how one individual survived through enormous adversity, unfortunately, I can’t see anyone describing this movie as uplifting. If only Before Night falls could have had a happy ending, but then real life doesn’t always oblige.
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