There's an awful lot of movie in La Bola Negra, the new film from the directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, who are known as Los Javis. They've made a sprawling literary-historical epic of gay male desire, one that toggles between the repressive, war-ravaged 1930s and the more liberated present day.
It's easy to see why the film has been passionately embraced, even if it falls far short of its maximalist ambitions. This is a movie of big, sweeping, often clumsy gestures, full of bloody conflict, outsized melodrama and sexual encounters that run the gamut from a forbidden caress to a Grindr hookup. In denouncing the fascism of the closet, it seeks to be a queer-cinema monument for the ages.
The directors, who co-wrote the script with the playwright Alberto Conejero, cut relentlessly among three stories about three gay men living in three different time frames. The film begins in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. After Italian planes bomb a small village, a young trumpet player named Sebastián, played by the musician Guitarricadelafuente, makes a harrowing escape. He survives by joining the right-wing Nationalist army, which is how he meets Rafael, a young freedom fighter who's been wounded and taken prisoner. Sebastián is ordered to watch over him, which is hardly the worst of assignments. Rafael, played by Miguel Bernardeau, is exceedingly handsome, and despite their mutual wariness, Sebastián feels unmistakable stirrings of desire.
Another of the three stories takes place in Granada, in 1932. Milo Quifes plays Carlos, a young man from a rich family, who's trying to become a member of an exclusive casino. But due to suspicions of his homosexuality, he's rejected, or blackballed.
La Bola Negra is Spanish for "The Black Ball"; it's also the title of an unfinished play by the great Federico García Lorca, a detail that will come into focus later. Carlos, who's pressured by his father to return to the casino and deny the rumors, goes out and vents his frustrations at a bar. There, he joins a crowd of dancers in a flamenco-style number.
The third story is set in 2017. Carlos González plays Alberto, a Madrid-based historian who enjoys the kind of casual sexual freedom that the 1930s protagonists could never dream of. One day, Alberto receives word that his maternal grandfather, whom he never knew, has died and left him a mysterious inheritance.
The nature of that inheritance leads Alberto to conduct his own research into Lorca's life and death. Lorca was murdered by Nationalist forces in 1936, and some believe that he was targeted for his homosexuality. His artistic and political legacy becomes the tissue that connects all three stories.
Many have noted that, with its intricate three-part structure and its celebration of a queer literary icon, the film owes a debt to The Hours, which won Nicole Kidman an Oscar for her performance as Virginia Woolf. You could see La Bola Negra as an homage to that film and other arthouse classics, something that directors Ambrossi and Calvo signal by casting a few veteran actors in diva-like cameos.
Penélope Cruz steals her every scene as a cabaret singer who dazzles the troops and provides some crucial guidance for Sebastián. And it's always a delight to see Glenn Close, even if she's been saddled with a drearily written role as an earnest Lorca scholar. Lola Dueñas strikes one of the film's few genuine chords of emotion as Alberto's mother, who resents his questions about the grandfather he never knew.
With the exception of González, who makes Alberto a poignantly understated presence, the other actors are somewhat anemic by comparison. The film's most substantial story is the 1937 one, but Guitarricadelafuente, despite his strikingly offbeat screen presence, isn't a skilled enough actor yet to hold the narrative center. It doesn't help that, because of their incessantly time-hopping structure, Ambrossi and Calvo are almost always looking away from their characters and their stories just as they're starting to get interesting.
This kind of showy crosscutting is a tough thing to structure an entire movie around, and here it merely hammers home an already obvious point: that the past and the present are deeply connected. In its final half-hour, La Bola Negra makes what I think is meant to be a bold leap into poetic abstraction, but what it really amounts to is just another narrative thread to cut away to: Call it Story #3B. In doing so, a film that aspires to be a monument instead becomes monumentally tedious.
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