Some flowers bloom in the dark. As soon as La Bola Negra (or Black Ball) begins, the rounded edges of the screen frame old postcard images from the Spanish Civil War. The fast-paced, stark black-and-white montage features attractive young soldiers and sailors, their uniforms painted bright pink—a tongue-in-cheek gesture somewhere between revealing and revealing a snobbery that’s been brushed aside and forgotten. This is how the film approaches its broad historical fiction, but its main goal is not to raise questions where none exist. Instead, it reimagines (boldly, and even completes) lost masterpieces and original stories left in ellipses. If anything, the movie’s perspective on queer history is a deeper force and one that is integrated with the world, rather than opposed to it. The result is a well-paced triptych that feels at once like a classic military piece.
Divided between three different periods, their connection is gradually becoming clear, the film from the directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo – known as Los Javis, and awarded as Best Director at Cannes combined with. FatherlandPaweł Pawlikowski—gays Spanish history by extracting it from hearsay and lost documents. It turns these into poignant poems painted on the big canvas of cinema. One story begins in 1937, when a town allied with the naive Mussolini is bombed from the air, the very Nationalists who hoped to welcome them. This brutal prologue sees one of the only survivors of the massacre—a tough-skinned, sensitive man named Sebastián (singer Guitarricadelafuente in his first film role)—join the fascist group in self-defense, despite the fact that he killed his mother.
Elsewhere, in 1932 Granada, a father-son story of hidden identities and class divisions unfolds in vibrant colors. A tough guy named Carlos (Milo Quifes) tries to join a fancy casino and social club, only to be rejected by his senior membership—they vote him down for picking up black balls; the origin of the word “blackballing”—because of rumors that he was gay. And finally, almost a century later in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a Spanish historian bent on Athens, casually scrolls through Grindr to meet up while trying to decide on a thesis topic for his PhD. This ends up being a family drama as well, as Alberto learns about a secret lineage through an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew, although it is told in a more restrained and realistic way than the two previous stories.
Little by little, and with a powerful self-abandonment, these same legends cross the pollen with echoes of beauty, their sounds and images infecting each other with every momentary leap, despite their different styles. Although the modern story of the movie is about an openly gay man, who is searching deeply for a purpose, his story in the Civil War is one of closed self-discovery—a world Sebastián has never been exposed to queer ideas—while the history of the casino revolves around the question of whether Carlos will stand up to him, or lie to be accepted, no matter how much it hurts him.
Eagle-eyed viewers (and those familiar with gay Spanish poetry) will recognize the latter as a cut version of the incomplete stage play from which the movie is named, written by Federico García Lorca. The playwright himself is an afterthought, invisible through most of the film, existing as a spiritual spectator just beyond the frame (he had been murdered in 1936). However, the historical fiction of Los Javis recognizes the themes of hidden desire that Lorca often faced, even if his eponymous play would have been the first with an obvious protagonist, had it been completed.
This sense of loss, and history conquered, equally informs the narrative of Sebastián, in which he is assigned the task of guarding a prisoner of war from the rival Spanish Republican party, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a handsome gay rebel taken from history, and a real connection with Lorca. It wasn’t long before Sebastián was taken with Rafael, in ways he still doesn’t understand. However, these themes of oppression begin to clash with Alberto’s modern saga. The focus is on an openly gay man who gradually connects with his own personal and political history, and in the process, contextualizes early 20th-century film narratives, as an often-overlooked continuum.
The three threads of the film, which are completely different, are bound by a sense of occasion and an impulse that concentrates the history of gays – not just as a series of factoids, but as different emotional things, which Los Javis forces their viewers to see for themselves in the plot. In their view, the history of gays is one of anger, anonymity and intrigue, white hot desire burning a hole in you, emotional self-harm, and ultimately, the breakdown of family ties. Even one event, as Carlos participates in a musical race that is accompanied by disappointment. At that time, Sebastián becomes a spectator (and an oblique participant) in the young child of the burlesque performer Nené (Penélope Cruz in a thundering scene), whose artistic expression is chosen with the cooperation of the country’s military-an episode that comes with a more critical eye than the colleagues who entered the Cannes competition. A coward. However, Nené’s kindness to Sebastián also begins to expand his understanding of the world. For example, he is the first person who made them aware of the existence of transgender people and struggling athletes, about whom he said: “Transvestism is a dream come true. War is the opposite.”
LA BOLA NEGRA ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
This idea is important in the dehistoricization of Los Javis, where crime is undoubtedly a different social and political symbol, but nevertheless, the filmmakers position it as something within civilization. In a world already full of oblivion and survival—it appears as two early 20th-century men fighting for their places in chaotic societies—it naturally veers between violence and self-loathing. If discipline did not exist, a world at war would have to invent it to eliminate the threat of compassion.
For Alberto, a modern and occasionally corrupt man whose story unfolds in a strange way, La Bola Negra he threatens to throw in a finger-wagging speech about how modern gays are gifted compared to the suffering of their ancestors. However, it resists this simplistic thinking by making Alberto discover and engage with the movie’s other stories—along with his fragile family ties, and his relationship with his estranged mother (Lola Dueñas, who plays with a troubled nature). In this process, even the legend of Alberto becomes a human one, as he gradually finds his place not only in modern society, but during the last century of Spanish history, and -with the help of Lorca’s historian played by Glenn Close -within the tradition of expressive art and shameless poetry.
Queer art has always existed on the fringes, and while La Bola NegraThe aesthetic approach contradicts this idea—it is common and digestible in the same way as the art of the greatest studio—this is one of its most affecting aspects. Its acquisition by streaming juggernaut Netflix speaks to the playability and broad reach of the movie, but it also represents the art of imitating life in fortunate ways. La Bola Negra it rethinks and builds on art from the fringes (including a play about Lorca by screenwriter Alberto Conejero), but turns it into the kind of lavish, expensive film production that, in years past, would never have given way to dramatic drama. But like modern film’s discovery of the past—which serves to consolidate historical chaos—its future mass distribution comes fraught with memory, courtesy of a story that encourages contemporary viewers to consider the long and winding road of this relatable commonplace. That Alberto could live such an ordinary life is full of miraculous qualities.
That the film of Los Javis is not strong, but traditional, is made stronger repeatedly in this process, due to its free sense of scale-as if the chains of financial pressure were no longer something that plays the role of cinema like it. Admittedly, no single movie can change the landscape so quickly, but this is a rare occasion when an epic film feels like an art in itself, without the need to compromise. When it dares to re-imagine the lost pages of Lorca’s play, all of this has become a conversation with history itself, written in the words of the power of nature, which once again takes its place of the essence of change, and of the revolutionary longing.
Without giving too much away: the poem appears at the beginning of the 155-minute film, where one of the central characters does not fully understand it, until he endures the loss and heartache that the verses speak of. La Bola Negra It also justifies its existence, just like the Rorschach test. Its filmmakers, like its characters, seem to hope that their work will not be the solace needed in those decades, because of the belief that great change is not only possible, but still ongoing. But until such a moment arrives, which makes films like this a little more urgent with constant progress, Los Javis has created an epic war that combines internal and external conflicts on the road to change the world, in ways that give the soul-which makes it more open, and more aware, to witness its joys and sorrows, and to understand its strengths and weaknesses.
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