PLOT: A young Nationalist soldier serving in the Spanish Civil War is assigned to keep an eye on a Republican prisoner, to whom he feels intense empathy — and maybe more?
REVIEW: La bola negra, which translates to The Black Ball, was one of the hotter titles to have emerged from the Cannes Film Festival. Netflix picked it up for a cool $5 million, with the thinking being that it will be one of the main awards contenders this year. Judging from the reception at Cannes (the place we first saw and reviewed it), where it received the longest standing ovation of the festival, it seems bound to become a major contender. It now hits TIFF with its shot at Oscar-gold (for best foreign language film) seemingly assured. While it lost the Palme d’Or to Fjord (another surefire Oscar contender), its directors, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, were among the winners for Best Director, and La bola negra will certainly establish them as major international auteurs.
Truly, having been lucky enough to catch this on a big IMAX screen, it’s a dazzlingly directed piece of work, weaving together three disparate timelines into a highly effective finale. The main thrust of the film — and the most compelling part — is set in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The movie’s first scene is a jaw-dropper, with young Sebastián (Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente), a trumpet player in a band, getting ready to perform at a welcome reception in his small village for the arriving fascists. Intending to welcome them with open arms, the entire town is gunned down instead, with Sebastián managing to escape, only to later be forcibly conscripted onto the Fascist-supported Nationalist side. He’s tasked with guarding a prisoner, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), who was once an aristocrat and is now a Republican, awaiting eventual interrogation and — inevitable — execution.
One of the main aspects of La bola negra is that it examines the Spanish Civil War through a distinctly queer lens, but it does so in a way that feels realistic to the times. While we, the viewers, figure out pretty early that Sebastián is gay, the character himself seems reluctant to admit as much about himself, as this simply wasn’t accepted at the time. His story is juxtaposed with the second timeline the film examines, which follows the experience of a young aristocrat named Carlos (Milo Quifes), who wants to be accepted as a member of his father’s private casino but is “blackballed” due to suspicions that he’s homosexual. This part of the film is based on Federico García Lorca’s unfinished story of the same name, with the fate of the manuscript and its eventual conclusion setting up the third timeline, set in modern times, when a gay historian, Alberto (Carlos González), comes into possession of it.
As usual for a movie that weaves together three (initially) separate stories, at times La bola negra is a touch unwieldy. It took me most of the running time to finally begin to appreciate the modern-day section, which struck me as flat, at least compared to the incredible sequences set in 1937, as Sebastián and Rafael strike up a tentative friendship, even if both know that the former will inevitably be ordered to kill the latter.
The production design and score are incredible, with Calvo and Ambrossi shooting on 35mm film, while the projected version simulates a vintage film print, complete with grain and cigarette burns, as well as rounded edges like you’d see in a pre-1949 theatrical projection (although they use a more cinematic 1.66:1 aspect ratio rather than the de rigueur 1.33:1 favoured by many indies). It’s a sprawling epic, with the brutality of the Spanish Civil War emphasized, as countrymen are forced to wage war against one another while the Fascists gain a foothold during Franco’s dictatorship.
Notably, the film contains two extended cameos, with Penélope Cruz getting two terrific musical numbers as a Spanish star brought in to entertain the troops, sporting pencil-thin eyebrows and eye-popping cleavage as she camps her way through the performances. Plus, there’s a Spanish-speaking Glenn Close as a Lorca historian in an extended sequence. Yet, despite being the “names” in the cast, the movie belongs to Guitarricadelafuente, who is stunning as the tortured Sebastián, who finds himself a true casualty of the war in more ways than one, with experiences that would colour an entire life. Even if you survive, you’re never going to escape the ravages of war and what you’ve been forced to do.
Hopefully Netflix gives La bola negra a theatrical component, as this is clearly not a movie meant for streaming, with it conceived as a theatrical epic. It’s big, muscular filmmaking on a grand scale, and a film everyone reading this will likely hear a ton about as the year goes on.
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