Screening at Cannes: Los Javis’s ‘La Bola Negra’

Some flowers bloom in darkness. As soon as La Bola Negra (or The Black Ball) begins, the screen’s rounded edges frame old postcard photos from the Spanish Civil War. A snappy montage, in stark black-and-white, features attractive young soldiers and sailors, whose uniforms have been painted over in bright pink—a tongue-in-cheek gesture somewhere between imposing and revealing a queerness tucked away and forgotten. This is how the film approaches its broad historical fiction, but its core imposition isn’t one of projecting queerness where it didn’t exist. Rather, it re-imagines (audaciously, and to completion) lost artworks and real stories left in ellipses. If anything, the movie’s view of queer history is that of a force deeply and inextricably entwined with the world, rather than at odds with it. The result is a magnificently moving triptych that feels at once novel and like a classically staged military epic.

Split between three distinct timelines, whose connections grow gradually clearer, the film from directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—who are collectively known as Los Javis, and were awarded Best Director at Cannes tied with Fatherland‘s Paweł Pawlikowski—conjures gay Spanish history by extracting it from whispers and lost writings. It turns these into painful poetry scrawled across a vast cinematic canvas. One story begins in 1937, with a naively Mussolini-aligned village being bombed by air, by the very Nationalists they’d hoped to welcome. This vicious prologue sees one of the massacre’s only survivors—a skinny, sensitive man named Sebastián (musician Guitarricadelafuente in his first film role)—joining up with this fascistic group out of self-preservation, despite them having killed his mother.

Elsewhere, in 1932 Granada, a father-son story of hidden identities and class divides unfolds in more operatic hues. A suave youth named Carlos (Milo Quifes) attempts to join the ranks of a fancy casino and social club, only for its senior membership to deny him—they vote him down by way of picking black balls; the origin of the term “blackballing”—owing to rumors that he’s a homosexual. And finally, nearly a century later in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a curvaceous Spanish historian in Athens, casually scrolls Grindr for a hookup while trying to decide on a thesis subject for his PhD. This ends up being a family drama too, as Alberto learns of a secret lineage via an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew, though it’s told in a more restrained and realistic mode than both prior stories.

Slowly, and then with forceful abandon, these parallel tales cross-pollinate through aesthetic echoes, their sounds and images pouring into one another at every temporal jump, despite their disparate styles. While the movie’s modern tale is of a gay man out in the open, searching prosaically for purpose, its Civil War story is one of closeted self-discovery—the country bumpkin Sebastián has barely been exposed to queer ideas—while its casino saga circles the question of whether Carlos will stand his ground, or lie for the sake of acceptance, no matter how it damages him.

Eagle-eyed viewers (and those familiar with gay Spanish poetry) will recognize the latter as a filmed version of the incomplete stageplay from which the movie gets its name, written by Federico García Lorca. The playwright himself is a looming, invisible presence through most of the film, existing as a spiritual observer just beyond the frame (he had been killed by 1936). However, Los Javis’ historical fiction realizes the themes of concealed desire in which Lorca often dealt, even though his eponymous play would have been his first with an explicitly queer protagonist, had it been completed.

This sense of loss, and of history subdued, equally informs Sebastián’s narrative, wherein he’s tasked with watching over a prisoner of war from the rival Spanish Republican faction, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a handsome gay rebel drawn from history, and with a real connection to Lorca. It isn’t long before Sebastián is taken with Rafael, in ways he doesn’t yet understand. However, these themes of repression play out initially at odds with Alberto’s more languid contemporary saga. Its focus is an openly gay man slowly connecting with both his personal and political history, and in the process, contextualizing the film’s early 20th-century stories, as a continuum oft-ignored.

The movie’s three, tonally distinct threads are bound by a sense of occasion and momentum that centers gay history—not only as a series of factoids, but as distinct emotional undercurrents, which Los Javis compel their viewers to intuit from the plot. In their purview, gay history is one of innuendo, of anonymity and subterfuge, of desire so white hot it burns a hole right through you, of emotional self-harm, and eventually, of strained family ties. It’s even one of pageantry, as Carlos engages in musical revelry buoyed by dismay. Meanwhile, Sebastián becomes an observer to (and oblique participant in) the minor tale of burlesque performer Nené (Penélope Cruz in a thundering cameo), whose artistic expression is co-opted by state militarism—a subplot approached with a more critical eye than fellow queer Cannes competition entry Coward. However, Nené’s kindness towards Sebastián also begins to expand his understanding of the world. For instance, she’s the first person to alert him to the existence of transgender people and drag performers, of whom she states: “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is the opposite.”

This notion is key to Los Javis’ forceful unspooling of history, in which queerness is undoubtedly a distinct social and political identity, and yet, one the filmmakers frame as intrinsic to civilization. In a world already torn between oblivion and survival—which manifests as two early 20th-century men wrestling with their places in volatile societies—it slots naturally within the jagged dynamic formed between violence and self-loathing. Were queerness non-existent, a world at war would have to invent it just to quash the threat of tenderness.

For Alberto, the modern and occasionally spoiled man whose story sticks out awkwardly, La Bola Negra threatens to curdle into a finger-wagging lecture about how good modern gay men have it compared to the suffering of their forebears. However, it resists this convenient instinct by having Alberto discover and engage with the movie’s other stories—alongside his own fragile family ties, and his relationship with his estranged mother (Lola Dueñas, performing with anxious naturalism). In the process, even Alberto’s tale becomes one of belonging, as he slowly finds his place not only in modern society, but within the last century of Spanish history, and—with the help of a Lorca historian played by Glenn Close—within a tradition of expressive art and poetry obliterated by shame.

Queer art has always existed in the margins, and while La Bola Negra‘s aesthetic approach runs counter to this notion—it’s as mainstream and digestible in form as the biggest studio classics—this is also one of its most affecting facets. Its purchase by streaming juggernaut Netflix speaks to the naked sentimentality at play and the movie’s broad potential reach, but it also represents life imitating art in fortuitous ways. La Bola Negra re-imagines and builds on art from the margins (including a play about Lorca by co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero), but transforms it into the kind of lavish, expensive movie production that would, in years past, have never been afforded to queer drama. But like the film’s modern discoveries of the past—which work to contextualize historical tumult—its impending dissemination to mass audiences comes pre-loaded with reminiscence, courtesy of a narrative that urges modern viewers to consider the long and winding road to this relative queer normalcy. That Alberto can live such a mundane life becomes imbued with miraculous qualities.

That Los Javis’ film is not radical in form, but traditional, is made retroactively powerful in the process, owing to its liberated sense of scale—as though the shackles of financial constraint were no longer a factor in cinema of its ilk. Granted, no one movie can change the landscape so quickly, but this is the rare time a queer film has felt like insider art, without the need for compromise. By the time it dares to re-imagine the lost pages of Lorca’s play, it all but becomes a conversation with history itself, literalized through powerful personifications of nature, which further snap into place its saga of transformative context, and transformative yearning.

Without giving too much away: a poem appears early in the movie’s sprawling 155-minute runtime, which one of the central characters doesn’t fully understand, until he’s endured the loss and heartache of which its verses speak. La Bola Negra similarly justifies its existence, as exactly such a Rorschach test. Its filmmakers, like its characters, seem to hope that their work won’t be a necessary comfort in decades hence, out of the belief that radical change is not only possible, but is perpetually ongoing. But until such a moment arrives, making films like this one less urgent through permanent progress, Los Javis have created a towering war epic that twins internal and external conflicts on the precipice of global change, in ways that render the soul—making it more open to, and more capable of, bearing witness to its joys and sorrows, and understanding its own strength and fragility.

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