A faithful filmic adaptation of Arenas' memoir could easily take six hours and still not capture the full impact of the book. Impressionistic and elliptical, his film presents a series of beautiful images rather than a strictly coherent sequence of events. Arenas' childhood is portrayed as fantastic flashes, much like a poet might nostalgically remember it. Young Reinaldo plays naked in the dirt as a crane shot pulls back quickly, to show him as a child whose sense of connection with nature will soon be threatened. Schnabel portrays the freedom and pleasure of beach culture, but only peripherally takes notice of the cruising and promiscuity.
Time passes with little reference, except occasional intertitles.
Arena's years in prison could be a month or a decade. Schnabel's film doesn't convey a particular history of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary Cuba. A valid question, of course, is whether the film could or should provide a tutorial in 20th-century Cuban politics. Regardless of whether such events are clearly chronicled, the film does not emphasize, as the book does, the extreme culture of fear and consistent betrayal among friends. Instead, Schnabel opts for moments that make great images and allows them to stand in for a story.