Despite what might perhaps be my higher reasoning, I enjoyed Before Night Falls. As I reflect on the film, I both recognize that it has a plethora of flaws affecting its plot, yet appreciate the overall tonal structure even more. I shall discuss the negatives first. As some of my fellow scholars have already pointed out, the film suffers by attempting with perhaps too much gusto to take on a surrealist tone. Plot elements are left intentionally quite vague, to an almost absurd degree, and this leads to difficulty following the story of Rey through his time in Cuba particularly. I think an excellent example of this hurting the movie comes after he is let out of prison. He immediately seems to fall back into a similar life to where he was before. Wasn’t he just asked to write for the revolutionary party? Isn’t he now under great threat from the state? The movie is definitely critical of Castro and his communists – so it seems unlikely that the similarity of his life before and after being accused of sexual assault and prison is meant to claim that the negatives of the party are exaggerated. Something feels missing, almost blatantly so, and this detracts from the messages of the film.

That being said, the scenes within the prison were incredibly captivating, and for the exact same reason I found the scenes bookending the prison frustrating. It doesn’t start directionless. Rey is motivated to write letters for his fellow inmates, and starts building up what (he describes) to be a mini empire around his writing prowess. He writes a new novel – and even seems to be about to effectively smuggle it out, but then it all comes crashing down. He is put in the claustrophobic box, and the most fantastic sequence of the movie begins. At multiple points through the next 15 minutes of the movie, scenes will start building from the previous scenes end. They follow a logical sequence, and have narrative moving them forward. Then, without any cue at all (particularly no auditory cue) the scene abruptly shifts backwards. The audience is left to conclude that whatever we were just shown must have been a hallucination, or an imagining of Rey. Events proceeding now directly contradict what we just saw. We return back to the claustrophobic box, even though Rey was just let out of in the previous scene. The disorientation of the situation is palpable and effective, and significantly captures Rey’s own disorientation throughout the latter half of his stay in prison. It’s hopelessness was so powerful, that even once Rey was legitimately let out of prison, I was worried for a good while that at any point it might without warning cut back to the claustrophobic box. It all felt so potentially illusory after the prison sequence (particularly after his interrogation by Lt. Victor). To answer the question in the title of this post – I think it is here that “night falls” for Rey. It is here that the hopelessness is at its peak.

All in all, I had mixed feelings about the film. The portrayal of homosexuals was refreshingly frank and straightforward, though I think overall the film bit off a bit more than it could chew, so to speak. The film had a lot of political points and social points it wanted to make. On top of this, it also wanted to maintain a deeply surreal tone and actively fought against a more regular narrative structure. One could argue that, in having both of these goals, the movie attempted to both have its cake and eat it to. And I would not be inclined to disagree. Though truly my final conception of the film is positive. There are multiple moments where the film, to my eye, truly shines (too many to list here), and when the film shines, it shines intensely.