La bola negra (trans. “the black ball”) is an unfinished play by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Only four pages exist, which tell the story of a young man whose application to a prestigious casino in Granada is rejected, and who tells his father that his rejection was due to allegations of homosexual conduct. This year’s film of the same title imagines that the play is not unfinished, but merely partially lost, and weaves together three narratives across nearly a century of time in order to tell the rest of that story.
In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is rejected by the casino, literally blackballed as they use a system of voting using white and onyx spheres. In 1937, Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) is a young trumpeter whose village is ready to welcome the Fascist forces of Mussolini (who is supporting the Nationalist rebels against the Republican forces), only for the Italian planes to open fire and kill most of the villagers. He escapes and is enlisted in the Spanish Nationalist forces, where he is tasked with guarding a prisoner of war, a Republican lieutenant colonel named Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau). Sebastián becomes enamored of the man, whom he learns was a footballer and actor in his younger days. Finally, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a lapsed playwright who has become a historian, is searching for musical recordings that predate the Spanish Civil War in the hopes of recovering a buried and forgotten queer history. When he is contacted by the estate of a grandfather he has presumed long dead, his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas), a troubled addict, tells him not to collect his inheritance. Albert chooses to go, and comes into possession of a manuscript that has been presumed lost for decades.
La bola negra is a majestic, sweeping, beautiful film. Carlos’s story is one that is haunted by gorgeous, surreal imagery that’s counterposed against the reality of closeted living in 1930s Granada, in both its dangers and its beauties. Carlos’s dreams are for him alone and are packed with beauty while his waking life is lived for others and is filled with monsters ready to leap out of cruisy alleyways to waylay him and call him back to heteronormativity. When the grandeur of his dreams breaks through into reality, he has a choice, and we learn only in the very end which one he makes, and whether it was the right one or not. Sebastián’s narrative is much more straightforward, and even more sorrowful; his mother dies, everyone he knows dies, he’s conscripted into an army fighting an ideological war that he wishes to have no stake in, and he falls in love with a prisoner that he knows he may one day be forced to execute. There’s beauty in the little moments that he can sneak, but it’s fleeting. The carnage of the war called to mind several sequences from On the Silver Globe (there’s one tracking shot that is composed almost identically, although I can’t be certain that this was a direct inspiration or simply a matter of great minds thinking alike) as well as Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, and it’s breathtaking.
Alberto’s story is smaller, more personal, and has the least bombast, but it would have to, as it is the one that is closest to us and thus most familiar. His attempts to make space in his life for his mother despite her abusive, erratic behavior are balanced by his supporting relationship with his partner Juan Pablo (Julio Torres). That ability to openly love and be loved is one of the defining differences between Alberto and the protagonists of the 1930s narratives. We get to see everyone’s mothers; Carlos’s is fretful but loving, minimally present in comparison to her daughter, whose struggles against the social restrictions of her gender mirror Carlos’s own inability to fully actualize; Sebastián’s mother is killed before we can learn anything about her, but her affection for her son is real; Alberto gets the benefit of being open, but he does not get to feel a mother’s unconditional love. The way that these narratives interweave with one another and serve as thematic and narrative bridges is something that I don’t want to reveal this early in the film’s run, as that pleasant feeling of everything falling into place is one that I enjoy and would like to preserve for others. It’s a satisfying reveal, and one that ultimately elevates the whole. You won’t want to miss it.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
