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Before Night Falls
directed by Julian Schnabel
starring Javier Bardem
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There is no surprise that Javier Bardem's exquisite performance as the late gay Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls is worthy of endless praise. What is surprising is that it actually got nominated for an Oscar this year by the usually conservative Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It's not that the Academy hasn't noticed the performances of gay characters before-- Tom Hanks won the Oscar for his portrayal of a man dying of AIDS-- and last year they even rewarded Hilary Swank for her depiction of Brandon Teena. What is amazing about the recognition of Bardem's work is that his Reinaldo Arenas is a gay men who has an extraordinarily healthy, rapacious appetite for sex and has no trouble getting it all the time.

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Times have changed, and it makes perfect sense for the Academy to acknowledge queer characters. Hollywood is, after all, overrun by homosexuals, even if most are closeted. But it's always made better sense for them to give Oscars to characters who are dying or murdered-- victims of Hollywood's famous pity vote that rewards representations of victimized, suffering, or dead Jews, blacks, women, and queers. It is true that Arenas was persecuted under Castro's draconian anti-queer laws and, after finally coming to America (and being dealt equally harshly by the US's degrading health care system) eventually died of AIDS. But Before Night Falls presents this as almost an afterthought-- the centrality of the film is a celebration of Arenas's sexuality and how it fuels and fires his artistic imagination.

The delicate balance between presenting an autobiographical story and celebrating within that context homo-sex should not be difficult. Yet until now, you'd be hard-pressed to find many examples. The problem is that in mainstream culture, to introduce non-problematic sexuality into a story is to make it "pornographic." Forget the fact that most people think about sex a great deal of the time and that (whether they are having it or not) it's central to their identities-- the presentation of sexual actions or even fantasies for their own sake is almost always frowned upon. Depiction of sex for the sake of sex is, in the view of "normal" society, extremist, wrong, and bad art.

What made Reinaldo Arenas's autobiographical Before Night Falls so vibrant was his ability-- erotophobes might say compulsion-- to tell us so much about his sexual life. Born in 1943 in rural poverty in Cuba, Arenas went on to become one of the country's most lauded novelists. And from an early age he was as interested in getting laid as making art. In straightforward prose, Arenas tells us about what he is reading, who he fucks on a mattress in the basement of a student dormitory, his friendships with such great Cuban writers as Jose Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, the sexual tastes of these men, and how many men the author had sexual contact with by 1972 (5,000). In Arenas's world the line between sex and creativity is so thin as to be invisible; the line between being a homosexual and an artist is negligible.

What director Julian Schnabel has done is to bring-- through the format of Cunningham O'Keefe's deftly wrought script-- Arenas's complex, sexy, profoundly illuminating memoir to life without any compromise. True, there is less sex in the film then in the book, but let's face it, there is a lot of sex in the book, all of which dovetailed perfectly with Arenas's stream-of-consciousness style, but would have been difficult to re-situate in the more formal narrative of the film. Yet never do we find Cunningham and Schnabel guilty of avoidance.

Schnabel recreates the lush beauty of Arenas's prose-- embedded in descriptions of the Cuban landscape-- as well as snorkeling to look at strangers' dicks underwater-- without ever avoiding any of the harsher elements of the story. At heart, Before Night Falls is a curious mixture of a sexual picaresque cloaking a political tract (Arenas's most passionate interest after cock is attacking Castro's government) cloaking what is essentially a retelling of Christ's passion. Here we have the artist as deity moving through his life of suffering only to be redeemed by the grace of sex.

Javier Bardem makes a perfect Reinaldo Arenas, blending sexuality and intelligence in his performance so elegantly that they are inseparable. Schnabel also manages to capture the craziness of Cuba after the revolution, both the excitements of new social and economic freedoms as well as the crisis caused by the new government's attacks on personal and artistic independence.

Schnabel has also modified, or at least downplayed, Arenas's attack on Castro's government, which is all to the better for the film. While none of the suffering Arenas endured-- arrests, imprisonment, confiscation of his work-- is ignored, Schnabel has more sensibly focused on the sexual component of his memoir. In doing this he comes close to capturing the elusiveness of Arenas's gossamer narrative-- the ways that sexuality and fucking infiltrate all of the other details of the story-- without ever betraying the basic politics of the piece. As a work of independent filmmaking, Before Night Falls is a testament to intelligence, integrity, and eroticism-- three qualities that Arenas promoted and appreciated in his life and work.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com