THE STORY – The Black Ball, inspired by an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca, is a queer vindication about three men in three different moments of Spanish history: 1932, 1937, and 2017.
THE CAST – Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González, Miguel Bernardeau, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz & Glenn Close
THE TEAM – Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo (Director/Writer) & Alberto Conejero (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 157 Minutes
The global queer community of today is in a fascinating, if stressful, place. On one hand, never have more people around the world been free to live their authentic lives, existing most days without fear of punishment or, in some of the more progressive places, discrimination. On the other hand, even in the more socially liberal countries, a general rise in far-right, fascistic viewpoints makes these freedoms feel strangely more precarious than they did just a few years ago. It’s a curious sociopolitical seesaw that millions of queer people reckon with daily. This real-world dichotomy makes the fragmented, decades-spanning “The Black Ball” all the more powerful, as it shows both how far we’ve come in a comparatively short amount of time and what it took to get here. “The Black Ball” is a towering, emotionally impactful epic that’s ambitious in its ideas and grand in its execution. With their film, directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo have constructed a major work of gay cinema, delivering the kind of artistic achievement that defines a filmmaking career forever.
“The Black Ball” is composed of three interlocking stories, introduced to the audience by the name of the central figure and the year in which each takes place. The film begins with a stunning wartime sequence set in northern Spain, establishing the “Sebastián 1937” third of the film, which the directors based on Alberto Conejero’s play “La piedra oscura”. After this rattling opener, the movie establishes the other two sections: the poetically rendered “Carlos 1932” and, in a shockingly huge leap forward, “Alberto 2017.”
Sebastián (played by the musician Guitarricadelafuente, making his acting debut) is a young trumpet player who’s suddenly forced out of his village and finds himself pulled into the fascist Nationalist army fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Carlos’ story is based on “La bola negra” (also the film’s original Spanish title), an unfinished play by gay Spanish author Federico García Lorca (the fact that it was never completed becomes narratively important, one of the film’s more impressively bold decisions). Played by Milo Quifes, Carlos is yet another young man who we first meet as he’s quite literally blackballed from joining a local social club, which his father has pressured him to try and join. And Alberto (Carlos González) is, you guessed it, a young Spanish man who struggles to find a purpose after putting aside his work as a playwright. Despite being separated by time and specific experience, all three are linked by their queerness, finding themselves facing both difficulties and joy because of their homosexuality (although, perhaps obviously, they generally encounter more of the former and less of the latter).
When films are this cleanly divided, it’s hard not to compare and contrast the different chapters. But Los Javis (as the directing pair is called) have interwoven all three narratives so cleanly and beautifully that it’s blessedly difficult to separate and favor one over the other. This is a queer film not just in its content but in its very structure, defying the pesky rules and standards of linear time. Just as in our everyday lives, the actions and misdeeds of yesterday can affect the present, so too can the idea of the future alter our behavior, as reflected in the film. The transitions between the three segments are seamless, thanks to an elegant editing job that knows exactly when to move from one chapter to the next. Brilliantly, certain sound effects and music cues carry over from one timeline to another, effectively showing how the actions of one era can still reverberate in another. Los Javis don’t so much flatten time as generously spread it out, mixing and melding eras to show that, for all the ways the queer community has changed and grown over time, our needs and desires have, in their simplest forms, remained the same. We want to live and love on our own terms, free from persecution and judgment.
In bringing their unique blend of adapted and original stories to the screen, Los Javis use filmmaking techniques that recall the well-crafted epics that once were a mainstay of Hollywood’s output. It’s such a joy to see a movie use old-fashioned methods to make itself feel big and important: “The Black Ball” features large crowds of extras and long, roving takes through beautiful, expansive sets. For instance, one such showstopping scene (of many) shoots Carlos in close-up as he moves through an evocative musical number in a bar, executing tricky blocking and choreography in an unbroken take. And the gorgeous, bombastic musical score by Raül Fernandez Miró invests the film with an ever-present sense of grandiosity, using giant brass and busy strings to give the movie a classic feeling. The music helps elevate the story into a place alongside other vaunted films, in the same way that definitive scores like those written for “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Lord of the Rings” do. Ambrossi and Calvo’s theatrical vision is mammoth, and their joint wrangling of so many superbly done craft elements speaks to their prodigious mastery as filmmakers.
But it’s not just in their Lean-like execution of scale that Los Javis prove their directorial prowess. Their large ensemble of performers all deliver uniformly compassionate, deeply felt work. Guitarricadelafuente’s Sebastián is sympathetic and soft while never feeling pathetic, even when clearly out of his element as a tool of war. He spends most of the film looking after the wounded enemy soldier Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), and the unexpected bond he forms with the man is made all the more believable, and thus more effective, because of Guitarricadelafuente’s effortlessly depicted attraction, thanks to the combined achievement of the actor’s portrayal and the directing team’s vision. Bernardeau makes for a stoic, striking screen companion, steadfast in his convictions. Los Javis shoot him in a way that makes him feel as classically and inarguably beautiful as a Greek statue, which only shows that Sebastián’s pull to him is all the more understandable. Rafael is often lit so that the shadows that fall on him emphasize his impressive figure, and in one breathtaking scene, the camera traces down his body while he’s cleaned, mimicking Sebastián’s furtive point of view. Los Javis obviously understand the inherent eroticism of the forbidden gaze, perfectly deploying this uniquely queer perspective for both thematic effect and visual flair. They make the power of longing and the bewitching feeling of yearning visual. Another scene of candid, matter-of-fact nudity shoots a group of soldiers as if they’re unknowingly in a Derek Jarman movie, with their masculine camaraderie given an unexpectedly suggestive tone by the camera, placing viewers of all orientations into Sebastián’s head. Los Javis similarly use certain dramatically highlighted objects and scenes (a crumbled statue, a fallen chandelier, a beachside fireworks display, etc.) to fabulously conjure melodrama as only a gay man (or, in this case, men) can.
Milo Quifes’ Carlos is, given his character’s ornately literary origins, appropriately evocative and enigmatic. He’s like cursive handwriting in human form, moving with a grace that’s both extraordinary to take in and serves as an unspoken indication of his sexual leanings, which is textually important for Carlos’ journey. And perhaps most notably to the types of viewers that this film is sure to attract (hello, boys), Glenn Close and Penélope Cruz make brief but extremely impactful appearances. Cruz plays Nené, a cabaret performer whom Sebastián’s military troop goes to see in their downtime. Unlike the rest of the men, Sebastián is drawn to her not for her body but for her warm spirit, and Nené clearly sees in him something different and safe. With thinly drawn eyebrows and a drag-like set of wigs, she’s borderline unrecognizable at first. But once she starts moving around her stage with complete comfort and control, Cruz’s star quality identifies her. She bursts like a misfired gun, disrupting the machismo surrounding Sebastián in a way that’s welcomed by both him and the film itself. Close is on the complete opposite end of the volume button, popping up to deliver a performance mostly in Spanish as a literary expert whom Alberto consults. She’s gentle yet direct, like a laser beam that soothes rather than slices. And hearing her say “homosexual” and “homophobia” in a Spanish accent gives the film a meme-ready moment of camp that feels like something all three lead characters across the different eras would appreciate.
“The Black Ball” is one of those films that come along every so often that remind us that there is still so much that can be done with the art form. There are new stories to tell, and as Los Javis show in their astounding film, sometimes the best way to do so is to look to the past. Just as the film tells a tale of yesterday and today merging, the directors use methods and approaches of moviemaking that have proven successful for decades to bring their decidedly 21st-century film to visual life. It’s a lengthy one (and some excessively padded moments could’ve used a less reverent eye in the editing room), but the path it carves through history – both the history depicted by the film and that of filmmaking itself – is worth taking, no matter how long it takes. This is a story that looks back to see how we can move forward; a cinematic thank-you note to our queer elders for the work they did and the progress they made, often in painful ways. In Sebastián’s final moment, Los Javis show a real-life work of artistic achievement being preserved against the literal march of fascism. With the benefit of hindsight, we in the audience know for a fact that said art has lived on well past the rule of the oppressive regime, which, at the time of its authoritative rise, must have felt impossible. In that way, “The Black Ball” shows that art – and within art, the communication of the ideas of truth and love – has the power to endure beyond the brief existences of evildoers, as long as we continue to fight for its preservation and for the freedom of artists to express themselves without restraint, just as Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo have done with their masterpiece.
