Ray Pride

From its earliest images, "Before Night Falls" seems like a hallucination of water, the tropics, faded film stocks, grainy, onrushing images of a lost time and place.

But then a pungent succession of an impoverished Cuban childhood and voice-overs of poetry by the late, exiled Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas situate painter Julian Schnabel's second feature (after "Basquiat") as a lyrical memory piece, steeped in sensation and sound. An early supporter of the Cuban Revolution, Arenas (played with soulful intensity by Javier Bardem) was persecuted for being a writer and for being gay, and spent years in and out of prison among petty criminals rather than political prisoners. Schnabel and his co-writers Cunningham O'Keefe and Lazaro Gomez Carriles (Arenas' last great friend, portrayed on screen by Olivier Martinez) manage the rare feat of portraying a writer's life as a succession of sensations, with a heightened intensity that suggests the ferment that leads to the weaving of linguistic wonder. The collaged world of "Before Night Falls" also boasts a rare empathy with the particulars of sexual desire, and the impassioned, richly sorrowful result is closer to visual arts than literature; moody cinema instead of earnest hagiography.

The 49-year-old director suggests that his approach to filmmaking is not unlike his way of painting; he's just working as a "crop rotator" in different fields. But Schnabel doesn't care for his work being dubbed "painterly": "It makes it sound like I'm dyslexic or something... Ultimately, I spend a lot of time leaning toward the divine light, and trusting that setting up certain elements [will come together]." He's willing to do the same in conversation, venturing far off the path of traditional interviews if prompted. That digressive gift, combined with a sustained mood, also inform "Before Night Falls." "There's a lot of chance that's happening and a lot of trust is involved, but everybody somehow is swept up in the same wave of that thing. I think the consistency of the attitude throughout the film is what makes it develop its own language."

Still, he is content at times to do away with language. "Ah yes. Sometimes I like to be alone. In a sense, there's more freedom in being alone and painting. I don't have to explain anything to anybody, nobody has to know what I mean. I don't have to know if it's good or bad or know what I'm doing. It's great when you don't hear anybody talking to you and you just can't even hear your inner voice. You just work through something. After a couple of car crashes of changing your mind in the middle of a stroke or obliterating something, then all of a sudden, something else pops out of it, you start to see something that maybe can become something else. That's what painting is. In a sense, when we were making the movie, I kind of did the same thing. If you think of the scene when we were doing, when Javier is going to leave [Cuba]. Andrea comes into his house, says, "Where are you going?" He says, "I'm leaving," he says. "How?" "Inner tube." He says, "you want to help me? OK, give me your money," and he grabs the money out of his pocket. Javier says, "You can stay here, you can have everything here." OK. I know that I want the scene to be in the room. I know that I want the feeling of one guy, the audience to feel like, "why is this guy able to walk into this other guy's room like this?" I want the feeling also of paranoia and invasion of privacy and of this kind of sense of the immediacy of fear. I have some kind of dialogue written, but it's not really that important. There are things that they are going to bring into the room, and I'm disrupting something and I've got something left over from somewhere else."

Much of the dialogue functions like lines of poetry, time bombs of ideas and images that detonate instead of being strictly expository. Schnabel agrees, and says his approach to the use of music is similar. "I think words color the movie in the same way that music colors the movie. I think when you hear Lou Reed's [contemporary] music in the nightclub or the music when he comes from the hospital [in New York at the movie's end] when his poem is read underneath. There's different kinds of things -- words, sounds, images, the combination of all three. The subtraction of one of those elements, and you end up with, I mean, the movie's like a painting. It functions like a painting because you denote what the narrative is or the chronology of the film is, but really what's happening is an aggregate of all of this stuff."

Each element has an equal, fragrant weight? "Which is, really, a Whitman-esque [approach]. And I really feel [Arenas] is like Walt Whitman. Even this pansexuality, I mean, he's having sex with trees, dirt, the river, rain, and then him abstaining from sex in prison. Because sex without freedom, he says, it's humiliating. That is really interesting. That means sex and freedom are the same thing to this guy. I just think the poem at the end, when he says, 'I'm that angry child who projects the insult of that angry child,' and that if you were to hypocritically tousle my hair, I would take that opportunity to steal your wallet. It's like anti-sentimentalist, but at the same time, it's got so much soul, he had so much soul. But it's deeply sad, because he doesn't feel self-pity."

(2001-02-08)

Also by Ray Pride

SLIPPERY SLOPES
There's always much to dispute with Sundance jury choices, but the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for "Memento" was apt, as was the Dramatic Audience Award for rock opera, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which also earned writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell the Dramatic Directing Award.
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
Early reviews have thrashed "The Wedding Planner" for being a straightforward, old-fashioned, almost irony-free romantic comedy. A bad call, I think, as the innocence and earnestness of this tale of two fated lovers who are kept apart by chance has its own charm.
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
Guy Ritchie's speedy, sarcastic, often hilarious follow-up to "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels -- almost a remake, in fact -- glories in gaudy vernacular and crass acts performed by a goombah smorgasbord.
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
Collectors of their near-100 special edition DVDs may not know how much time and effort go into producing them, but the multi-supplemented discs bespeak a rare passion.
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

FIGURE IN THE MIRROR
(2001-01-04)

HUMANE TRAFFIC
(2001-01-04)

THE SEA OF EMOTIONS
(2000-12-21)

DON WAN
(2000-12-14)

SAME RIVER TWICE
(2000-12-07)

GREEK TO ME
(2000-11-30)

STILL LIFE
(2000-11-30)

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