Spanish queer epic La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) is currently on fire. Winning audience’s choice at Toronto and the LFF and the best director gong at Cannes, it is bowling over both critics and audiences alike. Highly tipped to be a big winner at next year’s Oscars, is it really worthy of the hype?
The film plays over three separate timelines. We are initially introduced to Sebastian (the wonderfully named Guitarricadelafuente), a trumpet player during the Spanish civil war in 1937, who manages to get accidentally enlisted with the fascist nationalists. Sebastian is put in charge of watching injured Republican prisoner of war Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), and the two quickly build a shared bond of hidden and forbidden love. We then flip to Carlos (Milo Quifes), a wealthy young man living in 1932 Granada, who is attempting to join an elite casino against local (true) rumours of his own homosexuality. Carlos’s father is sympathetic to his sexuality but tries to make Carlos realise it has no place in the current society. Finally, we move forward to queer historian student Alberto (Carlos González), casually making Grinder requests on his phone in 2017, who learns of an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew.
The film bases itself on some truths; Rapun was real person and his relationships to playwright and poet Federico García Lorca is factually correct. The film takes this thread of fact and weaves fictional relationships and storylines around it into the movie’s main narrative.
With any film which has multiple timelines and stories, the trick is to make sure the audience has time to bond with the characters. Just as you’re getting into the head of one set of players, you’re whisked off to whole new environment, which can feel jarring and dissatisfying. Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi manage to just about pull this off, primarily by hinting at the links between the three timelines. Both set design and cinematography help with this as La Bola Negra is such a wonderful thing to look at. The film obviously illustrates how gay relationships have become more socially acceptable between the 1930s and modern day; Alberto’s causally arranged phone sex against the terror of Sabastian even looking at another man in a certain way. Yet, unlike the recent German queer war film Coward, La Bola Negra doesn’t make this the focus of the movie, instead slowly squeezing out a mostly captivating narrative to a background of gay relationships.
It can feel self-indulgent at times however; several overly theatrical song and dance routines feel a little redundant and temporarily halt the flow of the story. This also adds to an excessive running time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. One particular scene seems to have only been included as a vehicle for a Penelope Cruz cameo.
La Bola Negra is rightly gaining traction and sweeping up awards as it goes. It’s by no means perfect, and not quite the masterpiece it is being lauded as, but it is a fine example of how modern big budget queer cinema is advancing outside of its traditionally perceived narrow boundaries.
La Bola Negra is out now at cinemas.
Review by Colin Lomas
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