The Black Bolaa chronological epic about three queer men from different eras of Spanish history whose stories overlap and inform each other in unexpected ways, is an overstuffed but intermittently thrilling meditation on the intimate connections between fascism and homophobia, as well as a study of how repression and state violence harm not only the lives of individuals living under these systems, but also the emotional legacies they pass on to generations to come. The film’s co-directors and co-writers, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (former romantic partners, they bill themselves collectively as “Los Javis”), who won the best director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for their work on the film, have directed only one feature, the low-budget musical. Holy Camp!However they have also collaborated on several successful queer-themed projects for Spanish television. With The Black Bolathe Javis are taking a big step forward both in terms of ambition and production. Although not all of its intertwining stories are equally powerful, this two-hour, 40-minute film has the scale and audacity of a great modernist novel. It’s hard not to admire the courage and energy with which he continues to ask big philosophical and moral questions, even when the answers to those questions remain vague (or, on a few occasions, painfully awkward).
In the film’s heartbreaking opening sequence, set in 1937, the people of a small town in northern Spain prepare for festivities to welcome the Italian troops who are due to arrive that day. This part of the country aligned itself with Mussolini’s fascist forces against the elected Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, but its Italian visitors do not seem to be aware of this alliance. Even as the local village band plays the music that will welcome its would-be protectors, Mussolini’s bombers machine-gun the village, killing most of its residents and taking the town’s young men prisoner to fight alongside the nationalist rebels. One of these reluctant soldiers is Sebastián (played by Spanish musical artist Guitarricadelafuente in his first major film role), a young trumpeter whose mother is killed in the air raid.
Although Sebastián is far from siding with the fascists, he is naive enough to have no idea of what is at stake in the war. In the seaside prison camp where he is taken, he is tasked with keeping armed watch over a wounded soldier from the other camp, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), whom the camp commanders believe holds strategic military secrets. Gradually, the two men bond when they realize that they share not only a hatred for the macho tyrants who run the camp, but also an interest in theater, music and poetry. Rafael lets Sebastián read a love poem that he always carries with him, making him understand that the lover who wrote it for him – later revealed to be the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca – is a man. It is in Rafael’s company that the sheltered and repressed Sebastián begins to see the possibility of life as a homosexual who not only recognizes but embraces his sexual identity, and whose political values align with this sense of expanded personal freedom.
Even as the events of this period take place, the viewer is abruptly transported back in time to another story of thwarted desire: in Granada in 1932, a handsome young man from a wealthy family, Carlos (Milo Quifes), applies to become a member of his town’s local “casino” – a sort of elite men’s social club – and is rejected on the basis of his suspicions of homosexuality. (The “black ball” of the title refers to the color of the glass marbles indicating “no” votes during the casino’s elaborate voting ritual.) The look and feel of these scenes is subtly distinct from that of the grittier sequences involving Sebastián and Rafael. Carlos seems to exist in a more aesthetically stylized realm than these two battered and grimy soldiers, at one point joining a bar full of partygoers in a ravishing flamenco-style song and dance that plays out like a dream ballet in a musical. Later, these tonal shifts will make sense, when we begin to realize that Carlos is a character from a play by Lorca (one of the film’s inspirations, although it was never finished), called The Black Bola. (Other elements of the film’s story are taken from a 2013 play, The Stone of Darknessby Alberto Conejero, who co-wrote the screenplay with Javis.) How Carlos’ fictional universe will ultimately bring the film’s two real-life plots together becomes the film’s central puzzle. But despite all the pictorial and sonic beauty of the scenes in which he appears, Carlos, elegant and anguished, remains more of a symbol than a character in flesh and blood.
In a third timeline, set in 2017, we meet Alberto (Carlos González), a queer graduate student and former playwright based in Madrid. Alberto seeks to uncover the long-hidden stories of LGBTQ+ life and culture from decades past – a mission that will soon come to him not in academia but in real life. Returning from his fieldwork in Greece, he receives a call from the executor of his late grandfather’s estate. This ancestor, whom Alberto never met during his lifetime, left him sealed documents which must be collected in person from the grandfather, in an isolated village. With the support of her boyfriend (the actor, director and former Saturday evening live writer Julio Torres), and without the help of his drug-addicted and openly hostile mother (Lola Dueñas), Alberto attempts to piece together the meaning of the papers his grandfather entrusted to him. Whose hands do they actually belong to, and what does it mean that Alberto is the one entrusted with placing them there?
Like Bill Hader’s character Stefon in SNL I would say it, The Black Bola has everything, right down to a bawdy cabaret number performed by a sly Penélope Cruz (who only spends about 10 minutes total on screen and almost steals the film) and a two-scene appearance by a Spanish-speaking Glenn Close as American scholar Lorca who gives a lecture to a seminar room full of students, including Alberto. Despite the film’s consistently impressive level of mastery – the painterly cinematography is by Gris Jordana, the stirring symphonic score by Raül Refree – the three-part story structure has a raw and sometimes uneven quality. The screenplay seems to spend too much time on some passages, like a long sequence of Carlos wandering through an abstract snowy landscape, while rushing over others, like the clearly deeply troubled relationship between Alberto and his coke-snorting mother. However, it is better to have too many films than not enough, and there is a generosity in The Black BolaThis is maximalism. It’s as if an entire century of queer ancestors, silenced for too long, had been invited into a world that is raucous, abundant, sometimes exhausting, but ultimately nourishing. feast.
