La Bola Negra [The Black Ball]

With a spectacle so operatic and layered, it’s difficult to know where to start with La bola negra [The Black Ball], directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. This maximalist cinematic feast intertwines three storylines across three eras in Spain – pre-Francoist 1932 through to the Civil War and into the 2010s – depicting the shifting, painful environments in which queer love manifests itself. Based on an unfinished play written by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by Nationalist forces before he could ever finish it, the film is a poetic treatise on the endurance of queer desire in the face of intolerance and decisive, ideological violence.

Each scene was composed like a renaissance painting, reminiscent of the opulence of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Yet the Odyssean scale of the film and its emotional grip could be compared to the likes of The Great Gatsby. Where it stands entirely on its own is the sophistication of the structure, braiding together the storylines so deftly I was left winded when the penny dropped.

Love and war have been positioned side by side in stories for thousands of years, but the outright starkness between eros and despair, hope and desolation in La bola negra modified the atmosphere of the cinema. I thought the entire cast was fabulous, but my standouts were Guitarricadelafuente’s bittersweet portrayal of Sebastián – made all the more spectacular knowing it was his first acting performance outside of music videos – and the ever-magnetic Penélope Cruz as Nené Romero, whose electric cabaret act before a wolfish crowd of troupes offers a small glimpse into a more tolerant and free society.

Spain is in tatters; entire towns are collateral in a war that piles boys up on the back of trucks and dumps them at makeshift hospitals. The film is testimony to the total disintegration of a country, and what that means for people who must accept they will never get a shot at love, that that is for the next generation.

And yet, there is the turn of the century, both light-years and only two generations away; neither perfect nor complete, but more fertile soil. While there were moments where something beautifully implicit was later overstated as though the directors didn’t trust that the audience would ‘get it’, it’s hard to fault La bola negra. Its colour, grandeur, and tenderness put wings on my heart.