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La bola negra’s Curious Collage of Gay Life and Longing

Federico García Lorca’s La bola negra wasn’t left unfinished, it was barely started. Only the first four pages of this play were ever completed before Lorca, a gay socialist, was murdered by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. All that we know of the plot is that it concerned a privileged young man trying to join an exclusive club, who vote on approving members via blackballs (la bola negra) -and is denied entry due to his sexuality. What was intended to come after this is unknown.
But directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi endeavour to speculate in their film of the same name, in which they intertwine this vision of the work with two more stories related to the play set many decades apart -each speaking to the transcendent themes Lorca was apparently grappling with as well as a small tapestry of gay identity across the span of a century. By scope, it is one of the biggest films I’ve seen to centre homosexuality, its grandiosity of ambition matched with an intensity of melodramatic tone -especially in its middle chapter. And it really constructs itself rather well, as puzzle pieces of interconnectedness come into play and bring a richer context to the story. Even if in doing this, the film sidesteps a couple critical conversations.
Woven together, the three main storylines of the film take place in respectively 1932, 1937, and 2017. The earliest portion is in a sense an extrapolation of the titular text: Carlos (Milo Quifes) tries desperately to get into an elite social club that he is rejected from over rumours of his homosexuality, which he is adamantly in denial of. The second story follows Sebastián (Guitarradelafuente), a trumpeter conscripted into Franco's army at the height of the war after his village is destroyed who falls in love with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a Republican soldier, formerly a prominent actor, whom Sebastian is tasked with guarding. The last modern section centres on Alberto (Carlos González) -an analogue for the film's own co-writer Alberto Conejero- a playwright-turned-queer historian who travels to Cantabria to receive a mysterious inheritance from his recently deceased grandfather.
Known collectively as 'los Javis', the directors integrate their stories both visually and narratively very well. There are a series of smart transition devices, such as the linking of characters travelling or of intimate moments, and especially where the text of La bola negra comes into play -Lorca himself being a significant largely off-screen figure in each story. It reminds me a touch of how Sound of Falling blended its stories, though with eeriness replaced by longing. For Carlos and Sebastián, this is a major part of their story, each closeted and contending with suppressed desire. Los Javis illustrate this with grace and sensitivity but a keen heaviness on what it means for these men to hide a part of themselves -for Carlos even from himself until the end. Homophobia is presented as a weapon of the fascists, among many in their arsenal.
And Sebastián has to wield that weapon. His culpability is one of the thornier aspects of the movie that its directors acknowledge on some level, but don’t fully engage with. His primary emotional objection to the ideology he serves is with his connection to Rafael, and through Rafael the work of Lorca, who had been his former lover. His story is confined to this lens, and in not getting a sense of his relationship to the other tenets of Francoism, there risks a degree of normalization of such soldiers in the fascist regime. He is seen carrying out other atrocities -much as it might be inferred he is against them, it is rather cold comfort.
But where the depiction of gay men within a fascist infrastructure is handled with dubious grace, the love and great reverence the film holds towards the impact of queer art -and Lorca’s especially- translates wonderfully well. The poetry resonates, its influence felt in the script itself as it illuminates the grandiose scale of the film and the ways in which the imprints of art last and are transformed over time. La bola negra is a character in the film itself, and while it is unmistakably presumptuous of los Javis to contrive an ending for it that Lorca never got to envision himself, it oddly works for the purposes of this story and the spirit it aims to convey. The movie appears to present a tapestry of closeted queer life, external and internalized homophobia, but while it does articulate the social struggle, it is more about the determination and perseverance of queer identity and desire, and the interconnected network of the stories it tells speak to that in a very potent way. Even for Alberto, removed though he is from both Franco’s regime and institutional homophobia more broadly, he is tied into that story and those themes as he openly works to chart the constellation of queer history.
The film is visually splendid, from an opening sequence that ends on an evocatively composed shot of a pile of downed statues and ruins in an old church that Sebastián stands atop in a beautiful bit of symbolism to the erotic imagery of men, sometimes framed like ancient sculptures themselves, bathing naked in a stream; the colourful, artful performance of a cabaret singer played by Penélope Cruz, recognizing and supportive of Sebastián’s sexuality to the sheer stark mountains that Carlos journeys through near the close of his story. Los Javis it appears took very seriously the sense of awe they imbued in their story, distinguishing things further by a couple late chapters on Lorca himself rendered in black-and-white. Pretty cinematography complimented by an atmospheric score amplifies the drama of the stories’ relationship, and so too does some prestige in the casting, which also includes a surprisingly Spanish-fluent Glenn Close as a scholar of Lorca. Gravitas in a story like this can account for a lot and La bola negra has that in spades. You can feel the excitement of its directors with the canvas of time and aesthetics they can work with here. The result is big and impressive even where the action for stretches is not.
Alberto’s story in particular can get a little dry at times, so far from the high stakes of the others, even if he himself is one of the film’s more interesting characters. But the overarching nature of the narrative is never dull; the puzzle pieces coming together are engaging for their own sake but so too is the emotional involvement in the material. It is not romantic in a conventional sense -even Sebastián and Rafael don’t have a love story (and it’s a good thing because their relationship ends in a very messed up way). But it indulges in a romance towards attraction itself, and gay identity, and the moving notion that art is a conduit for these. There is an enigmatic quality to La bola negra, in a characteristically poetic way it ends in a spirit of nebulous though provocative musing. And yet for its issues and traumas it radiates something energized and optimistic, perhaps even joyful. Maybe the blackballs aren’t so bad a judgement. Maybe they are even a mark of pride.

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