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Screening at Cannes: Los Javis’s ‘La Bola Negra’

This sprawling queer epic about the Spanish Civil War, a lost stage play and rediscovering buried history is a must-see.

Some flowers bloom in darkness. As soon as La Bola Negra (or The Black Ball) begins, the screen’s rounded edges frame old postcard photos from the Spanish Civil War. A snappy montage, in stark black-and-white, features attractive young soldiers and sailors, whose uniforms have been painted over in bright pink—a tongue-in-cheek gesture somewhere between imposing and revealing a queerness tucked away and forgotten. This is how the film approaches its broad historical fiction, but its core imposition isn’t one of projecting queerness where it didn’t exist. Rather, it re-imagines (audaciously, and to completion) lost artworks and real stories left in ellipses. If anything, the movie’s view of queer history is that of a force deeply and inextricably entwined with the world, rather than at odds with it. The result is a magnificently moving triptych that feels at once novel and like a classically staged military epic.

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Split between three distinct timelines, whose connections grow gradually clearer, the film from directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—who are collectively known as Los Javis, and were awarded Best Director at Cannes tied with Fatherland‘s Paweł Pawlikowski—conjures gay Spanish history by extracting it from whispers and lost writings. It turns these into painful poetry scrawled across a vast cinematic canvas. One story begins in 1937, with a naively Mussolini-aligned village being bombed by air, by the very Nationalists they’d hoped to welcome. This vicious prologue sees one of the massacre’s only survivors—a skinny, sensitive man named Sebastián (musician Guitarricadelafuente in his first film role)—joining up with this fascistic group out of self-preservation, despite them having killed his mother.

Elsewhere, in 1932 Granada, a father-son story of hidden identities and class divides unfolds in more operatic hues. A suave youth named Carlos (Milo Quifes) attempts to join the ranks of a fancy casino and social club, only for its senior membership to deny him—they vote him down by way of picking black balls; the origin of the term “blackballing”—owing to rumors that he’s a homosexual. And........

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