Before Night Falls (15)

Coming out in Cuba: the secret history

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Read Anthony Quinn's review

In Before Night Falls, the autobiography of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, the title refers to the author's days on the run, hiding in parks and trying to do his daily writing before it was too dark to see. Julian Schnabel's screen portrait of Arenas does justice to this image: it's a rare film that truly evokes the passion and desperation of the literary life, the urgency of writing as the clock ticks. This was a serious preoccupation of Arenas, not just as a proscribed gay writer in Communist Cuba, but as an exile living with Aids in New York, where he died in 1990. Suitably, Schnabel goes about recreating Arenas's life with an intensity as if there was no tomorrow ­ or as if film hadn't been thought of and it was up to Schnabel to invent it for himself.

Notorious in the 1980s for his massive smashed-crockery canvases, New York painter Schnabel re-invented himself with his 1996 film-making debut Basquiat, a hagiography of the hipster artist as martyr. Basquiat was ferociously self-indulgent, but showed a novice's voracious appetite to try anything, in belligerent disregard of biopic convention.

His extremely confident follow-up is a significant advance: Schnabel is standing back from his subject and addressing a wider audience than the au fait coterie implied by Basquiat. He's also cut down the star cameos, though be warned about the brief, bizarrely accented manifestation of Sean Penn ("You want to yoin de rebels?"). Schnabel here addresses another magnificent brief life. Born in rural poverty, Arenas (played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem) flourished in Havana as a writer, only to be censored, then interned in Cuba's camps for gays, dissidents and, as Arenas puts it, "those who wear their pants too tight".

Schnabel's Arenas has unsurprisingly proved contentious, with the Cuba Solidarity Campaign accusing the film of pushing an anti-Castro line. Arenas was indeed anti-Castro, yet at the start of his career he enthusiastically embraced the Revolution. A key moment of the film fairly resounds with revolutionary fervour: a montage of contemporary newsreel is set to Arenas's voice-over account of the initial days of flags and fireworks. It's only then that we see the revolutionary vision domesticated: Schnabel cuts to a classroom, and a dreary doctrinal lesson from a Russian lecturer.

Seemingly less concerned with Cuban politics than with Arenas's personal trajectory, the film in fact proposes a psychosexual study of Cuban culture. Up to a point, the film is a coming-out story, as Arenas gradually discovers his sexuality. His world is charged with homoeroticism: a sunny idyll of sweat, Brilliantine and short-sleeved shirts. In parallel, Arenas sanguinely detects a sexual revolution, although it will soon be repressed. Cuban masculinity seems to be testing its own sexual limits: Arenas and friends are surprised on a beach by soldiers, yet the menace resolves itself in moonlit skylarking.

For Arenas, all this goes in tandem with his literary utopia of a typewriter and a sunlit rooftop. But the film can be clumsy about the question of writing. The only scene where Schnabel lays his philosophical cards on the table is the most leaden ­ Arenas's literary mentor tells him that an artist is at once the ultimate rebel and the ultimate counter-revolutionary, then sends him away to read Proust.

Revolution for Schnabel seems a matter of art and the body rather than of the state ­ he's fascinated above all by Arenas's guiding principle of enraptured perception. The film's most euphoric moments show a hedonistic pre-Castro culture persisting underneath the official structures of the Revolution: a nightclub with synchronised swimmers, a santería ritual busted by the militia to the poignantly incongruous strains of Mahler.

Arenas sees sex as resistance, and in one scene ­ startling if, perhaps intentionally, a little awkward ­ sexual reverie provides a means of liberation. A prison interrogation becomes an erotic fantasy, all the more charged because the officer is played by Johnny Depp, seen only a few scenes earlier as a transvestite with a miraculous and highly practical rectum. In context, it's Depp in khakis and bristling moustaches who really seems the drag act.

The whole film, you might say, is eroticised ­ that is, poeticised in the extreme. The lush opening, evoking Arenas's forest childhood, suggests Schnabel may have been bowled over by Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line ­ we see swooning treetops, raging river torrents. There's almost an embarrassment of bravura sequences, shot by Xavier Pérez Grobet and Guillermo Rosas: Sixties Havana street life, a breathtakingly improbable hot-air balloon flight, snowfall over New York. Schnabel mixes film stocks with a predilection for the sensuously grainy ­ the textures dance across the screen, as if the restlessness of the subject had worked its way into the images on a molecular level.

What centres all the formal daring is Javier Bardem's command as Arenas. Best known as the priapic joker of Bigas Luna's broad comedies, he shows a sensitivity and range you would have never suspected. His Arenas develops physically throughout, starting out hunched up, with shy, prissy arm movements; by the time he is carried into jail laughing his head off, he has become an athlete of martyrdom. Bardem's readings of Arenas's poetry are beautifully cadenced: you could happily listen with your eyes shut.

Schnabel has been accused of being too purely visual a thinker, yet in Before Night Falls, the spoken word is unusually important. (One of the film's writers, with Cunningham O'Keefe and Schnabel, is Arenas's close friend Lázaro Gómez Carriles, played in the film by Olivier Martinez). The dialogue is in both English and Spanish, but the film, not to mention Bardem's apparently very accurate East Cuban accent, makes no concessions to Anglophone audiences ­ which, for American cinema, is a political gesture in itself. Perhaps that is as far as Before Night Falls really goes in being political. But unlike Basquiat, this couldn't possibly be dismissed as a "painterly" film. Directorly, however, it most definitely is.