Before Night Falls ***** (2000, Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn) – Classic Movie Review 1630

This richly imagined journey into the life and writings of the brilliant openly gay Cuban author and exile Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) is a devastating, overwhelming piece of cinema, directed and co-written with passion and brilliance by Julien Schnabel, the maker of Basquiat.

Javier Bardem’s eloquent and complex performance won him the 2000 Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for best actor and an Oscar nomination. The film, which took the grand jury prize at Venice, spans Arenas’s entire life from his Cuban rural childhood and his early embrace of the revolution to his persecution as a writer and homosexual in Castro’s Cuba of the 60s, on to his departure from Cuba in the Mariel harbour exodus in 1980 to his exile and death in the US.

The movie combines passages of huge imagination with urgent realism in a wholly successful entity and a scathing condemnation of repression and persecution under a totalitarian state. Schnabel’s wife Olatz Lopez Garmendia plays Arenas’s mother. Johnny Depp (in two startlingly contrasting roles as Bon Bon and Lieutenant Victor), Olivier Martinez, Andrea di Stefano, Sean Penn, Pedro Armendáriz Jr,  Diego Luna, Jerzy Skolimowski, Hector Babenco and Michael Wincott also appear in support.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1630

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