LA BOLA NEGRA
FOUR AND A HALF STARS Three stories are intimately linked by sexuality, desire and one of Federico García Lorca´s last, unfinished works.
PERIOD DRAMA SPAIN Spanish #LABOLANEGRA Starring Blanca Soroa, Patricia López Arnaiz
With its sweeping historical canvas, interlocking narratives and unabashed cinematic ambition, LA BOLA NEGRA is something of a rarity: a gay film with the scale and sensibility of an old-fashioned epic. Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have taken an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca as their inspiration for an ambitious, beautifully realised and frequently mesmerising exploration of repression and identity amid the ghosts of Spain's past.
What makes the film particularly refreshing is its sheer scale. Gay stories are so often confined to coming-of-age exercises or variations on the romantic comedy that this lavish production feels positively monumental by comparison. It has a big-screen sensibility, an appetite for spectacle and a narrative confidence that makes its 155 minutes fly by. There is even a little whimsy in the way the filmmakers weave their historical and literary references into proceedings, although the underlying material is anything but frivolous.
There are three apparently unrelated narratives. In 1932 Granada, young Carlos (Milo Quifes) seeks membership of an exclusive gentlemen's club, only to be blackballed when his homosexuality becomes the subject of gossip. The ritual of acceptance, involving the solemn casting of black or white balls, is a wonderfully theatrical piece of social exclusion.
Five years later, Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente), a young trumpeter, finds himself caught up in the Spanish Civil War, forcibly enlisted into Franco's Nationalist army after his village is bombed. Assigned to guard wounded Republican prisoner Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), he develops feelings that are distinctly inconvenient given the political and military circumstances. Their relationship provides the film with its most immediately affecting romantic strand, a delicate and increasingly dangerous affair in which desire and survival become rather uncomfortable bedfellows.
Meanwhile, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a young researcher investigating queer identities and music from the 1920s, receives an unexpected inheritance from his maternal grandfather. His mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas) is decidedly unenthusiastic about the family history being disturbed, but Alberto's curiosity takes him on a journey that gradually exposes the connections between the three stories. Until these threads finally come together, the filmmakers maintain a compelling mystery. There are clues, echoes and intriguing little narrative crossovers, but the pleasure is in not quite knowing where everything is heading. When the pieces eventually fall into place, the revelations are both poignant and satisfying.
The production is superb, with exquisite period detail, gorgeous cinematography and an impressive visual imagination. Penélope Cruz is terrific in a cameo as Nené, a flamboyant nightclub performer whose appearance brings a welcome burst of theatrical electricity. Also refreshing is the film's frank treatment of gay sexuality, including some fairly graphic encounters involving a leading man who is emphatically not from central casting. It's an unusually matter-of-fact and welcome departure from the sanitised, pin-up expectations often imposed on gay cinema.
Beneath all the visual splendour, however, lies a surprisingly bruising examination of inherited pain and the damage families can inflict, often without intending to. The three stories are bound not simply by sexuality and history, but by a generational inheritance of secrets, rejection and decidedly complicated mother-son relationships. These linked maternal wounds give the film an additional emotional resonance, although Sebastián's experience is particularly devastating. Watching both his mother and the man he loves die before his eyes is an almost unbearable accumulation of loss, made all the more affecting by the tenderness with which the story has allowed us to invest in him. The personal and the political collide with terrible force, reminding us that repression is never an abstract historical concept when it is played out on the bodies and lives of those caught in its path.
LA BOLA NEGRA is big, bold and gloriously unafraid of its own ambition. Its interlocking stories, simmering tensions and sumptuous production make for an unusually engrossing piece of gay cinema, one that thinks well beyond the confines of the genre. Occasionally grandiose, perhaps, but when a film has this much visual flair, narrative intrigue and emotional punch, a little grandstanding is entirely forgivable. Essential even.
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