I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time I was watching La Bola Negra. I haven’t lost my breath this much since Tom Ford’s A Single Man or Destiny’s Child’s 2005 R&B pop single “Lose My Breath”.
It was that intense.
The sweeping romantic war epic directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, who are lovingly referred to as “Los Javis”, is a triptych set across three eras.
With the lore of Lorca’s play and his other texts as the film’s North Star, Los Javis also fold in Alberto Conejero’s play La piedra oscura to create sumptuous, achingly gorgeous queer cinema at its highest caliber.
Spanish musical artist Guitarricadelafuente makes his acting debut as the kind-eyed, golden-hearted Sebastian, a young trumpet player in 1937 forced to join the National forces to survive. He is tasked with guarding an injured prisoner of war, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), and while doing so, they begin to share a romantic connection.
In the 1932 portion is the adaptation of the play, which follows a young man named Carlos (Milo Quifes) — who comes from a wealthy family — on a mission to become a member of an exclusive social club in Granada. However, he is blackballed because he is rumored to wave that rainbow flag on occasion.
Fast-forward to 2017, and we are met with the final piece of the triptych. Carlos González plays Alberto, a playwright who has seen better days. Now working as a historian in Madrid, he finds out his estranged maternal grandfather has died, and he must travel north to Cantabria to gather an inheritance.
After his mother, Teresa — who is played with brilliant toxicity by Lola Dueñas — demands that he not even bother, Alberto catches a train and learns a lot more than he has bargained for.
He learns that his grandaddy was Sebastian and that part of his inheritance is the missing pages of “La Bola Negra”.
From 1932 to 1937 to 2017, La Bola Negra is a sweeping, romantic cinematic spectacle that is nothing like you will see this year. Living at this intersection of Pedro Almodóvar and Federico Fellini, Los Javis took the incredible work they did with Veneno, the series about the iconic titular trans Spanish singer, and took it to an epic level.
When Rafael introduces Sebastian to pieces of literature, he falls in love. At one point in the film, Sebastian goes to a show with a cupletista, which is essentially a cabaret performer. Actually, in this case, it was essentially a drag queen.
We meet Nené Romero (It took me a minute to realize it was Penélope Cruz), a character inspired by the real-life “queen of cuplé” Olga Ramos, who was known for her wit and cheeky performances. Fun fact: her real-life daughter, Olga María, served as a consultant on the film.
Sebastian is enamored by the freedom Nené has on stage. The reckless abandon and joy she has while she performs and controls the audience. He yearns for it.
As she talks to him backstage, she tells him the story of real-life female impersonator Edmond de Bries, and tells him: “Transvestitism is the fantasy of the possible. War is the opposite.” before straddling a makeshift tank and rolling onto the stage for one last performance with her painted-on Edith Piaf eyebrows.
Sebastian lives in comfort when he feels the romantic connection with Rafael, who is more open with his identity. But he suppresses his true self when anyone else is around.
In 2017, Alberto has a supportive partner in Juan (it was a pleasure to see Julio Torres in a film like this), but even so, he is jaded by his life as a playwright, drained by his rocky family history, and exhausted by his career as a historian.
Even though Alberto lives his life openly as a queer man and life for LGBTQ folks is comparatively less harsh than it was in the 1930s, it’s as if he has inherited the suppression of identity and the expressive shame that flowed through the veins of Sebastian and Carlos.
When Alberto discovers the missing pages of Lorca’s play and shares them with a scholar and historian, Isabelle (played with a quiet modesty by Glenn Close), it’s as if he unlocked something. All of a sudden, a history that has been attempted to be erased and buried is now within reach and has given a sense of liberation not only to Alberto, but also Sebastian, Carlos, and Rafael.
The film recognizes how queer history is often erased or ignored and how that can impact the community and our identity. La Bola Negra brings a passionate sense of importance and urgency to untold queer history and how unearthing it can be a form of freedom.
“La bola negra” literally means “the black ball”, a symbol of rejection. Set in a time of war, the film has the man submitting to conformity. They are adorned in a uniform of obedience. When Nené says those words: “Transvestitism is the fantasy of the possible. War is the opposite,” Los Javis unearth the moral center of the film.
Nené calls out what man has created to annhilate: the freedom to imagine yourself outside of something other than the confines of colonized, patriarchal, hyper-heteronormative society.
Guitarricadelafuente, Bernardeau, Bernardeau, and Quifes are a phenomenal ensemble that carry out Los Javis’s vision with an enormous amount of grace, respect, and integrity. And although the sapphic energy in this film could have been amped up a bit, Cruz and Dueñas did a lot of the heavy lifting to make up for the absence of the need for a woman’s perspective.
A surefire Oscar contender that is sure to blow many of its competitors out of the water, La Bola Negra has all the makings of classic Hollywood cinema, but unapologetically and exquisitely queer.
Los Javis continue to platform queerness as more than just an identity or a novel “DEI” device that fulfills a Hollywood checkbox for optics. Transness, queerness, and all things gay are a universal symbol authenticity. La Bola Negra is a cinematic epic that shows how war and the patriarchy has and will continue to go out of their way to destroy queerness — but queerness will and always has persevered.
