by Elisa Giudici
The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA
By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.
The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...
The obsessions remain familiar: desire and its repression, memory and Catholic shame. But the emotional grammar is different now, filtered through creators raised equally on auteur cinema and prestige television. And television, for better and worse, remains deeply embedded in the film’s DNA.
Still, before its excesses begin swallowing it whole, La Bola Negra is often genuinely thrilling. The film moves across three timelines - 1932, 1937, and 2017 - weaving together literary invention, historical trauma, and queer longing into something that wants very badly to become Spain’s great queer national melodrama. At its center lies a fictional lost manuscript inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished final project, discovered decades later by Alberto (Carlos González), a historian estranged from the grandfather who leaves it behind.
Inside that manuscript lives Carlos (Milos Quifes), a wealthy young man ostracized by his community over rumors about his sexuality. Elsewhere, during the Spanish Civil War, musician Guitarricadelafuente gives the film its emotional core as Sebastián, a young soldier whose assignment guarding an enemy prisoner slowly destabilizes his shaking understanding of traditional masculinity. Around them swirl generations of silenced histories and hidden romances, and emotional ghosts passed down like family heirlooms.
LA BOLA NEGRA
The Los Javis are at their strongest when they stop trying to intellectualize these connections and simply let the emotional continuity across time emerge organically. One of the film’s most beautiful motifs involves a Roman mosaic depicting a lesbian couple uncovered beneath a village field after an aratro catches underground. It’s a blunt metaphor, perhaps, but an effective one: queer history not as invention or revisionism, but as something literally buried beneath the surface of Spain itself. That idea gives La Bola Negra its urgency. The film argues that the end of dictatorship did not automatically produce liberation, only a more subtle inheritance of silence. Queer lives continue to exist hidden inside apartments, manuscripts, family stories, and coded gestures, waiting for a future capable of looking directly at them without shame. The Los Javis understand that repression survives culturally long after it disappears institutionally.
What’s especially striking is how unabashedly monumental the filmmaking becomes in pursuit of these ideas. There are sequences here staged with astonishing confidence. An early scene depicting a village celebration for arriving Italian troops collapsing into sudden massacre is probably the film’s finest achievement: chaotic yet lucid, emotionally precise despite the scale, and executed with a visual authority that suggests filmmakers eager to prove they can command large cinematic canvases without losing intimacy.
For well over an hour, La Bola Negra sustains that momentum. The images have weight and the performances hold. The emotional ambition feels earned rather than imposed. Then, gradually, the film begins collapsing under the pressure of its own accumulation. The Los Javis struggle to subtract. Narrative threads multiply until the film begins straining under their cumulative weight, while the symbolic imagery grows increasingly insistent and emotional climaxes arrive with so little modulation that moments meant to devastate start competing with one another for significance. Entire subplots feel included less out of narrative necessity than out of the directors’ apparent reluctance to abandon any thematic pathway the material opens up for them. Even some of the film’s most undeniably beautiful passages (especially the glacier sequences that arrive late in the runtime) emerge at a point when the storytelling already feels so overloaded that their visual grandeur risks registering less as revelation than as further accumulation.
The sensation becomes that of watching filmmakers trying to wrestle a work larger than their current artistic discipline can fully contain. La Bola Negra keeps widening its scope (folding historical trauma, queer longing, inherited silence, literary mythology, and national identity into the same sprawling structure) without always finding a stable center capable of holding those elements together. At its best, the film achieves a genuinely moving synthesis between the intimate and the monumental. More often, though, it continues expanding in every direction at once, as if the Los Javis were still searching for which emotional thread truly deserves to anchor the film.
The ending suffers most from this inability to close doors. Rather than culminating, the film slowly diffuses into a succession of increasingly emphatic emotional codas, each searching for the definitive final image that will justify everything preceding it. None quite arrives. There are smaller miscalculations too. Penélope Cruz, in a limited role, leaves a sharp emotional impression almost instantly. Glenn Close, meanwhile, feels stranded inside the film, her heavily accented Spanish drawing noticeable distraction in the room during the Cannes screening. Her presence carries the unmistakable scent of prestige casting rather than organic necessity.
And yet dismissing La Bola Negra as merely overstuffed or undisciplined would miss what makes it compelling. There is something deeply alive in its refusal of moderation. The Los Javis are trying to imagine a form of queer cinema that is both popular and monumental, emotionally direct without surrendering historical scope. They are chasing Almodóvar, yes, but also something distinctly contemporary: a cinema shaped by viewers whose emotional literacy was formed as much by serialized storytelling as by traditional arthouse austerity.
That tension is visible everywhere in the filmmaking. The score constantly underlines emotions already fully legible. Scenes stretch past their natural endpoint. Silence is treated almost suspiciously. The film fears emptiness, fears stillness, fears leaving emotional space unfilled. It is a profoundly television-trained instinct, and one the duo still hasn’t entirely recalibrated for cinema.
But perhaps that’s also why La Bola Negra remains difficult to dismiss. Cannes is full of controlled films this year, more elegant films about queerness, war, and identity under repression. Few, however, feel this emotionally ravenous. This is the classic second major feature from artists still discovering the scale of their own ambition: too much, too loud, too long, too eager to matter. But also too sincere in its desire to become something enduring to reduce it to failure. La Bola Negra may not fully hold together, but its reach toward greatness is impossible to mistake.