Thanks to the great support of the streamer, “La Bola Negra” will be one of the most high-profile award contenders of the year.
Netflix has pinned many of its hopes on the Oscars La Bola Negra—and for good reason.
A gay historical epic that, with its lush melodrama and tragic romance spanning multiple time periods, resembles Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Academy Award-winning film. The English patient crossed with the critical darling of Claire Denis in 1999 Nice workthe film by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi feels both old and new. Heartbreaking and poignant even when its schematic seams appear, it’s a moving saga about the knotty ties that bind us to our past — and, hopefully, slowly unravel — that imbues its conventions with weight and heart.
Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau in La Bola Negra.
Presented in theaters on October 16 after celebrated screenings at the Cannes, Toronto and San Sebastian festivals – and broadcast on Netflix from December 2 –The Black Bola is inspired by the unfinished piece of the same name by Federico García Lorca. Lorca wrote only four pages of this incomplete work before he was killed in 1936, and the first of Calvo and Ambrossi’s three stories dramatizes it, with Carlos (Milo Quifes) visiting a casino in 1932 Granada to find out if he would gain membership.
Penelope Cruz.
Turns out the answer is no, because the older, dark-suited gentlemen who run the place largely vote blackballs down because, as becomes clear later, they object to Carlos in the white suit being gay.
As Carlos endures this unpleasant decision and, shortly after, his father orders him to return to the casino to demand another vote, The Black Bola simultaneously focuses on Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente). A trumpeter living in a small rural town with his mother in 1937, the musician narrowly survived an attack by Italian bombers during the Spanish Civil War and, to stay alive, joined the country’s nationalist army.
Carlos Gonzalez and Julio Torres.
Sebastián is a sensitive aspiring artist who is not cut out for his new vocation, and this is accentuated when he is assigned to guard the prisoner Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a seriously injured “red” and for whom he slowly develops feelings, attracting even more suspicion from his comrades.
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The Black Bola does not initially designate Carlos’ story as Lorca’s final (partial) play, nor does it immediately elucidate the connection between these plot elements and his 2017 action involving Alberto (Carlos González), a failed playwright who lives in Madrid with his boyfriend Juan Pablo (SNL former Julio Torres) and researching queer music recordings from the 1920s.
He puts this pursuit on hold when he is informed by a lawyer that his maternal grandfather has died and left him an inheritance. Because his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), is extremely hostile to any discussion of this topic, getting answers about his ancestor requires a trip to Cantabria. What he discovers turns out to be more than he bargained for, and in doing so helps tie together the film’s disparate threads.
Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau.
In their second outing as director (after 2017 The call), Calvo and Ambrossi demonstrate impressive formal grace with The Black Bolanimbly moving between their decades (and their protagonists) so that parallels and echoes emerge naturally from their astute editorial juxtapositions.
Constructed intuitively, the film is a kind of piece of memory, linked less to a character than to the Spanish nation as a whole, and in particular to its gay community, whose subjugation is an extension of the fascist tyranny that engulfed the country in the 1930s.
Although this impression is subtle in earlier passages, it becomes powerful in later stanzas, as the mysterious connections shared by Carlos, Sebastián, Rafael, Alberto, and Teresa come into sharper focus and, therefore, bring the memory to the forefront as a key piece of its puzzle.
Milo Quifes.
A whirlwind of art, love, repression and conflict amid (and after) authoritarianism and war, The Black Bola is both a universal story of loss and endurance and an explicitly queer fable about identity, action, survival, and progress. Calvo and Ambrossi’s trio of gay protagonists are all discovering and embracing each other, and the directors evoke their confusion, desire, fear, and excitement with a palpable intimacy, whether in views of naked soldiers frolicking along a rocky shoreline or a close-up of Sebastián’s hand hovering over Rafael’s wounded body.
In Sebastián’s case, his awakening is also facilitated by a trip to the theater, where he is seduced by the impetuous sexual performance of Nené Romero, a firebrand vividly embodied by Penélope Cruz, even if the script entrusts him with the thankless role of Sebastián’s LGBTQ+ guardian, complete with the artist announcing that “cross-dressing” conceals “the fantasy of the possible”.
Guitarricadelafuente in La bola negra.
Aside from Nené’s pointed remarks (and a few others), The Black Bola refrains from indulging in more exposition than necessary, and Calvo and Ambrossi deepen their multi-pronged portrait by filling their frame with a cornucopia of striking faces. Whether it’s the aged faces looking back at Carlos as he awaits his casino membership fate or the waiter and customers at the restaurant where Teresa reacts poorly to Alberto’s questions about her heritage, the background of the frame is full of personality, contributing to the richness of the film. Their visuals strive to achieve the mythic without losing sight of the reality of their main characters, and this balance between the noble and the concrete remains consistent throughout.
Guitarricadelafuente in the role of Sebastián.
Like Cruz, Glenn Close’s participation as the Lorca expert that Alberto ends up seeking is more distracting than beneficial; despite the star’s proficient Spanish, she stands out in a cast of authentic, soulful (and, here in the States, largely unknown) Spanish actors. It’s hard not to feel like the two Hollywood veterans were brought on board more because they’ll help sell the film than because they’re a perfect fit for the material. Yet they are too peripheral to interfere significantly with the generally evocative proceedings, which sway and fade toward a touching finale all over the place.
Glenn Close and Carlos Gonzalez.
If The Black Bola‘s temporal flip-flopping can be a little conservative at times, the emphasis on gay desire, suffering and quiet triumph less so, and its balance is embodied by a conclusion that delivers the touching rewards the filmmakers have been building towards.
Whether or not this brings Calvo and Ambrossi (and Netflix) to the Oscar stage in a year where Christopher Nolan’s own war epic, The Odysseyis poised to dominate the awards field, it’s something that heralds the duo as very promising artists.
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