The Insistent Monumentality of “La Bola Negra”

It starts with a bang—a fiery explosion, a cloud of smoke, a horrific bloodbath. The year is 1937, deep into the Spanish Civil War, and a group of villagers have gathered to cheer on the right-wing Nationalists against the left-wing Republicans and to welcome the intervention of Benito Mussolini’s troops. The consequences of their Fascist alignment land with a fuck-around-and-find-out swiftness that would be funny if it weren’t so hellish: just as a band starts to play, Italian planes drop a friendly-fire payload, killing many and sending survivors fleeing in terror. Among them is a wide-eyed young trumpet player who makes a detour through a ruined church, where a large, toppled statue of St. Sebastian blocks his path—a sad sight, but also a happy accident. Grabbing onto the thick arrows protruding from the statue’s chest, he clambers over the wreckage and makes his way to safety.

So begins “La Bola Negra,” an extravagantly overwrought epic from the Spanish directors and screenwriters Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, with the first of a few clever, if tortured, winks. The trumpeter (played by the singer Guitarricadelafuente, in his screen-acting début) is himself named Sebastián, though when he beholds that fallen statue he sees only a means of escape, not a famously martyred namesake or a marble-muscled icon of homoerotic desire. The filmmakers see all, though, and not always to their advantage; they approach their characters with an omniscient loftiness, a big-picture grandiosity that too often crowds the smaller sculptural details out of the frame. “La Bola Negra,” which runs close to three hours and unfolds acrossnearly a century, wants to be a sweeping historical epic of gay longing—a film about what it means to be a man who desires other men in times of war and peace, and who must either resist or surrender to the fascism of the closet. Upon the ruins of St. Sebastian, Ambrossi and Calvo mean to erect a cinematic monument for the ages; instead, they have produced a film that insists, arrogantly and aggressively, on its own monumentality.

Sebastián’s mother is killed in the attack, a presumably devastating shock that is waved almost impatiently aside. He survives, barely, by joining the Nationalist Army: “I’m one of you,” he promises, and his words hover unsettlingly in the air. There’s a delicacy to Sebastián, a hushed fearfulness, that sets him apart from his new comrades. At a seaside military base, he looks on, with furtive lust, as the other men walk, play, bathe, swim, piss, and practice formations in the nude—a sequence to remind some, fondly, of “Sebastiane” (1976), Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress’s feverishly horny reimagining of the saint’s life and martyrdom. The soldiers here are fine-looking men in service of an ugly cause, and one thing that “La Bola Negra” gets right, and trusts us to grasp on our own, is that beauty draws no moral distinctions. Sebastián’s attention can be readily magnetized by his fellow-Fascists one moment and by a prisoner of war the next, which is exactly what happens. When Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a Republican freedom fighter with piercing eyes and a lower abdominal wound, is wheeled into the infirmary, Sebastián is assigned to watch over him and extract information. Yet Rafael, willing and even eager to die for his antifascist principles, returns Sebastián’s gaze without flinching, and with a sense of rebuke that is complicated by unspoken yet unmistakable flickers of desire.

Sebastián and Rafael are not the only characters of note. Ambrossi and Calvo go by the two-in-one moniker Los Javis, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that they approach their narrative in a similar spirit of multitasking compression. The movie consists of three stories, set in three different time frames, and unfurls them simultaneously, in a hyper-controlled frenzy of crosscutting. Sebastián’s tale, adapted from the play “La Piedra Oscura,” by Alberto Conejero (who is credited as Ambrossi and Calvo’s co-writer), is the most substantial of the three, and the other two stories coil around it tightly, like tensile vines. Not long after meeting Sebastián, we are whisked off to Granada, in 1932, where Carlos (Milo Quifes), a reserved, elegantly dressed young man, applies for membership at an exclusive casino. But the casino committee rejects his bid, owing, we later learn, to cruel yet accurate rumors of his homosexuality: “Bola negra, bola negra, bola negra” goes the refrain, as one damning black ball after another rolls down the pike. Carlos’s rich, image-conscious father orders him to return to the casino the next day and refute the suspicions. His mother, a more quietly supportive soul, encourages him to move to Madrid, where he can live more freely.

We get a bracing taste of that liberation in the third strand: it’s 2017, and Alberto (Carlos González), a Madrid-based historian, need only look to Grindr to satisfy an urge (“Sex now,” he types, before he’s uttered a word). Quite the contrast with Carlos, who must stalk some potential trade through the streets at night, and with Sebastián, whose throat goes dry at the mere sight of Rafael’s bare chest. You could argue that Ambrossi and Calvo are old-school romantics at heart, alive to the teasing thrill of the forbidden, and accordingly skeptical of the modern age and its all too convenient spoils. Alberto himself seems nostalgic for the tensions of a crueller bygone era, if the thesis that he’s writing—it involves queer dissident musicians from the nineteen-twenties—is any indication.

A knottier research project awaits him. Alberto learns that his grandfather—whom his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), was bitterly estranged from and never introduced her son to—has recently died and left him a curious inheritance, a mystery that needs untangling. The answers, the viewer can probably guess, will bring the 1932 and 1937 chapters into unifying focus, and although González makes Alberto an engaging enough sleuth, he can’t transcend the passive, puzzle-solving function that the character has been assigned. In the words of Alberto’s concerned boyfriend (Julio Torres), revealing more about the film’s shortcomings than he perhaps intends, “Isn’t it funny that the only story you don’t care about is your own?”

Before “La Bola Negra” won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (an honor it shared, hilariously, with Paweł Pawlikowski’s exquisitely minimalist “Fatherland”), Ambrossi and Calvo were known for many things. They were a Spanish-entertainment power couple for more than a decade before ending their relationship late last year. Their past collaborations include several TV series—including the popular “Veneno,” a portrait of the transgender sex worker and entertainer Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez—and a feature film from 2017, “La Llamada,” adapted from their own stage musical. They are also card-carrying cinephiles, as their recent interviews have taken pains to flaunt: “La Bola Negra,” they’ve said, carries the artistic DNA of wartime-youth classics such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1963) and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1987), and also Claire Denis’s masterwork of soldier-sublimated eroticism, “Beau Travail” (2000). My own mind drifted toward other great films, including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Three Times” (2006), a century-spanning trilogy that at once preserves and subverts the boundaries of linear time, and Terence Davies’s “Benediction” (2022), a wrenching biographical portrait of a war veteran and poet who regards his own same-sex desires with profound ambivalence.

But the queer art-house touchstone I’ve heard referenced most often in connection with “La Bola Negra” is Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” (2002), a mutually unflattering comparison if ever there was one. In both films, everything comes in threes, the incessant crosscutting is accorded a flashy metaphysical weight, and time itself is manipulated, distorted, and rearranged to the point of meaninglessness. The complexities of human longing across the ages are not explored so much as solved, in the manner of a mathematical proof. But what, exactly, is being proved here? The universality of suffering? The magic of editing? Perhaps it’s simply that the most self-consciously expansive films are so often the most reductive, the most diagrammatic—and, incidentally, the most inclined to take refuge in a great artist’s shadow. “The Hours” framed itself as a morbidly repressed valentine to Virginia Woolf, and “La Bola Negra,” with uncloseted exuberance, hitches itself to the mantle of another queer literary giant, Federico García Lorca. Although Lorca isn’t granted his own narrative, his life and legacy—the passion of his left-wing activism, the subversiveness of his art, and the open secret of his homosexuality—make up the tissue that connects all three of the film’s stories.

History has no need for spoiler warnings, but anyone hoping for an untainted experience of the film—a description that applies to no one who’s read this far—might want to skip over the facts that follow. The first is that Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, the P.O.W. who catches Sebastián’s eye, was a real person: a football player, an actor, and a close friend and eventual lover of Lorca’s. The second is that, in 1936, not long before Lorca was murdered by Nationalist forces, he began writing a play called “La Bola Negra,” the bare bones of which—he got only four pages in—inspire another part of the film. No wonder, then, that the tale of Carlos’s blackballing seems to float in a more poetically diffuse register than the other two, at least until the closing stretch, when it takes a hard detour into uncharted realms of snowily lyrical bombast. The wispiness of the written source can go only so far in justifying the fan-fiction tedium of the onscreen result. By this point, Ambrossi and Calvo aren’t so much paying tribute to Lorca as trying to outdo him.

All three stories, whatever their theatrical provenance or cinematic intent, are marred by the same odd insubstantiality; it’s as if the directors, brandishing a rigid narrative and thematic blueprint, were unable to marshal character, dialogue, and action in service of their overarching designs. The 1937 chapter, intended to serve as the film’s spine, suffers most noticeably as a consequence. It isn’t just that Guitarricadelafuente, called on to embody a blur of moral and sexual confusion, settles for looking straight-up perplexed. Even a seasoned performer might have had trouble pulling off the scene in which Sebastián, unable to bear the troops’ violent attack on Rafael, retreats into a corner with his musical instrument and quite literally trumpets his agony to the skies. That’s “La Bola Negra,” more or less (and mostly less): rote trauma divorced from psychology, flailing gestures divorced from meaning. The sole performer who survives this chapter is Miguel Bernardeau, intensely charismatic as the physically frail but spiritually fortified Rafael. Here, in the film’s most memorably composed image, is a man hovering between life and death, his wounded body bathed in an almost celestial light—another allusion to St. Sebastian, and one that signals a tragedy to come.

The other indelible moments in “La Bola Negra” are isolated affairs—focussed, pointedly, on three women on the narrative periphery, whose roles are amplified by strategic, diva-like concentrations of star power. As a cabaret musician who entertains the troops, Penélope Cruz is a wickedly brassy marvel—vamping up a storm one minute, grumbling about her menstrual cycle the next, and eventually coaxing even Sebastián out of his mopey shell. Glenn Close, as a Lorca scholar with an earnest backstory of L.G.B.T.Q.+ allyship, arrives bearing the script’s best intentions and its dreariest dialogue, and yet she rises, by dint of her ineffable Closeness, above the dross of the writing. And then there is, most powerfully of all, Lola Dueñas, known for her work with the director Pedro Almodóvar (who is credited as an associate producer in “La Bola Negra”). As a most un-saintlike Mother Teresa, Dueñas gives voice to a seething, inconsolable fury, an assertion of pure, ferocious will, that exposes the preciousness of Ambrossi and Calvo’s poetic and structural conceits. This film is no monument; it’s a bust. ♦

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