Venice treats.

With Johnny Depp in a dual role--as a smuggling drag queen and a lecherous police official--Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls was the surprise hit of the Venice film festival in September. In a glorious take on the late gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas's memoirs, Schnabel gets great work from Spanish hunk Javier Bardem, who took Best Actor honors. The film frankly recounts Arenas's fate in Castro's Cuba: imprisonment, exile, AIDS, and, when he was very ill, suicide. (Fine Line will release the film in the United States in December.)

Among the festival's other gay and homoerotic entries:

* The Wrestlers is an unintentionally funny Indian film in which two men who work at a remote railway crossing use any excuse to strip to their briefs and wrestle.

* Phantom, a darkly lit, somewhat naive Portuguese movie, traces a garbage collector's erotic nocturnal scavenging, involving mask-wearing and public sex.

* In Burnt Money, an Argentine film with Wagnerian flourishes, two men meet in a public john and become lovers and partners in crime.

* Barbet Schroeder's Out Lady of the. Assassins follows a middle-aged writer who returns to drug-riddled Medellin, Colombia, where he falls in love with a 16-year-old hired assassin.