Ever since its third edition, the Toronto International Film Festival has allowed its audiences to vote for their personal favorites. Back in 1978, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends took the prize, and, to this day, remains in the minority of titles to win the TIFF public’s favor without scoring any Oscar nomination. Populist appeal reigns supreme in this honor’s storied history, as does Hollywood's overshadowing of world cinema in the mainstream mindset. Before this year, we need to go back to 2011’s Where Do We Go Now? to find a victor not spoken in English. And if we’re talking about Spanish film in particular, Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from 1988 was the only People’s Choice champion with a Spaniard production behind it. Until La Bola Negra, that is.
Los Javis’ Best Director prizewinner from Cannes is now well positioned in the awards race to come, backed all the way by Netflix, and having even convinced the Toronto crowd to deliver one of those protracted standing ovations that go viral every year directly from the major European fests. The Best International Film nomination seems all but secured for Spain, maybe even the win. Some are considering it a Best Picture frontrunner, already, which would be unheard of for a Spanish flick. And that’s it for awards chatter. Now, let’s focus on what really matters – the film itself…
Before elaborating on La Bola Negra’s thesis, how it articulates it, the tricky dialogue it establishes between queerness and fascism, shame and memory, style and whatnot, one should summarize the thing a bit. For simplicity’s sake, if nothing else. Because this is one ambitious mélange of ideas, running for over two and a half hours, intertwining three distinct narrative threads that span from the early 1930s to the late 2010s. Comparisons to The Hours are obvious but rather misleading, for La Bola Negra’s relationship to the play whose title it reclaims is quite different from the earlier film’s dalliances with Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s musings on it.
For starters, the original La Bola Negra is an unfinished play. The film’s first narrative thread, set in 1932, speculates on what that text could’ve been beyond the four pages Federico García Lorca (Alberto Cortés) penned before his assassination in 1936, at the beginnings of the Civil War and Fascist rule over Spain. In this tale, thought to be Lorca’s first direct acknowledgment of queer themes in his work, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is the scion of a wealthy family in Granada, currently trying to gain access to an exclusive casino. In those hallowed halls, he faces the judgment of a panel that votes on his suitability with black and white marble spheres. The latter signals approval, the former rejection. As an aristocratic youth, he’d be thought to be an obvious inclusion to the institution’s membership, if not for the persistent rumors of his homosexuality.
Five years later, La Bola Negra finds Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente), who joins the Nationalist cause out of a survivalist despair. It’s not that he shares their fascist ideals – his queer desire alone would posit him against far-right conservatism – but that he wants to live through the war and has no scruples about how to achieve that goal. Things get complicated when he’s assigned to stand guard over a handsome POW who might have more in common with Sebastián than he would be comfortable admitting. Another play inspires this section, though one which is a modern reflection on yesteryear and blissfully complete. It’s Alberto Conejero’s La Piedra Oscura, about the last days of Lorca’s lover, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), in a military hospital run by enemy forces.
Finally, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González) is a former playwright turned academic researcher who hears back from his grandfather during a work trip abroad. The man, whom he never met, has died and bequeathed him something in his will. Alberto’s mother, played by a melodramatic Lola Dueñas and whose relationship with her son is only slightly less contentious than the one she maintains with the memory of her father, wants nothing to do with it. Yet, curiosity leads Alberto to the Spanish countryside, where a spiderweb of secrets and tender, unspoken truths conglomerate around the patriarch’s ghost and that inheritance. At the end of the visit, though not the end of his journey, Alberto finds himself holding the missing pages of La Bola Negra.
Just at the level of plotting and structure, this is one high-minded, overachieving and slightly chimeric monument of a movie. But that’s just surface-level stuff. Dig deeper and you’ll find a mélange of cinematic approaches that play further with genre and, at times, threaten to make La Bola Negra into a musical as one man dances to song, the other plays it, and the last listens with studious intent, or a dream-like meditation on the afterlife. Stylization communes with a more grounded realism, but these dichotomies aren’t necessarily delineated by the timeline splits. In one particularly memorable example, Sebastián seems to sing for the play’s protagonist - original song “La Nieve” - while, in another, more perverse gesture, the sublimated desires of the past can only be expressed in the present.
In 1936, DP Gris Jordana will film half-naked, half-dead bodies of fallen soldiers, piled high on a wagon. The violence perpetrated against these men is obvious, but so is the lascivious hunger with which the camera devours them. In 2017, there’s another, less morbid, sort of meat market as Grindr shows up on-screen, a black-hearted lark of a comparison that the edit proposes and culminates with the film’s only sex scene. Yes, there’s much yearning in La Bola Negra, but only Alberto follows the siren call of his wants before the camera’s eye. And for a film bursting at the seams with twinks and hunks, and statues of that ol’ queer favorite Saint Sebastian, to have this chubby academic be the sole protagonist of a sex scene feels like a gesture against the normative hierarchies of desire.
That’s far from its only transgression and meditation on the inherent politics of bodies, of queerness, of everything in our lives. Somewhat lost in the emotional sprawl the film conjures for international audiences, La Bola Negra constitutes a necessary dialogue about the Spanish Civil War, whose echoes of hatred, violence and shame still reverberate in our modern time. The Pact of Forgetting, codified in the Amnesty Law of 1977, is never outright mentioned. Still, it looms over La Bola Negra as the ultimate manifestation of ignominy, dressed as remorse, for a country that could not deal with the horrors of the past and instead chose erasure in the name of a fragile peace. The status quo was preserved, but at what cost?
In that regard, La Bola Negra feels more in conversation with Carracedo and Bahar’s The Silence of Others documentary and Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers than with The Hours or any sort of Hollywood production. Indeed, the Almodóvar brothers are listed as producers in La Bola Negra’s credits. Well, that independence from American movies might be a tad overstated for effect since Penélope Cruz’s reluctant peddler of propaganda has a lot of Sally Bowles and Cabaret in her DNA, not to mention Dietrich’s Blue Angel. But she’s just as much Maggie Smith in Oh What a Lovely War! and the ghost of Cruz’s own earlier success, The Girl of Your Dreams. And speaking of Hollywood, can we get a cheer for Glenn Close?
The actress shows up for minimal screen time as an academic who has dedicated her studies to Lorca. The analysis she proposes runs counter to the default way this figure has been read, including in Spanish school programs, where his stylistic surrealism and leftist sociopolitical observations on class and economics take center stage. La Bola Negra, like Close’s character, doesn’t disregard these aspects of Lorca but chooses to look elsewhere for its central thesis, to tell the story left untold and consider how queerness echoed through his life. And, indeed, his death in Granada, where it is speculated that the execution was marked by homophobic insults thrown at the writer, before and after Nationalist bullets stopped his heart, stole his last breath, and robbed the world of a literary genius, not to mention an innocent life.
If you long for a more materialist or even Marxist consideration of Lorca, that is already out there in the relative mainstream of academia and state-sponsored education. Los Javis are motivated by the emotional pull of recognition as queer men, just as Close’s character puts forward justifications that situate her motives in a personal relationship with queerness. That doesn’t, however, preclude the filmmakers from connecting one form of considering Lorca to another and, through that, expanding the study to encompass an entire nation lost in the purgatory of shame. That happens to be La Bola Negra’s central concept, paralleling national shame with the shame felt by queer individuals born and bred in societies where they are made to feel apologetic and perchance even disgusted about desires and identities that fall outside the boundaries of normalcy.
Many readers will be familiar with such feelings. Shame constrains, it impedes life, and, when abetted by the sin of forgetting, it annihilates everything to leave behind a barren wasteland of nothingness. Queer shame, in particular, can be self-inflicted or forced upon us by others, felt by others in relation to those they are meant to love and sometimes claim to love through their shaming. Oh, but shame corrodes you and yours and those to come. Spain is beset by it, whether in alignment with Catholic tradition – La Bola Negra is laden with such imagery way beyond its Saint Sebastians – or its tricky relationship with its own History. A relationship marked by an avoidance that, unwittingly, leads to the nightmares of the past contaminating the present and stealing from the future.
La Bola Negra spells a lot of this out, often to a degree that should feel insulting to the audience’s intelligence if not for the complexity of the themes at hand. It doesn’t quite explain foreign histories to international audiences, but it does enough to be clear rather than confounding. However, one dark implication it suggests yet never confronts or directly articulates is that, while some remain insistent on forgetting our shared History, Franco’s fascism will never end. The war will never be over unless we confront yesterday as the foundation of today, be that as nations, as families, or even just as people wondering about their place in the world. A reckoning is needed. Maybe a thousand reckonings, or more.
That does not make La Bola Negra an “important film” – loathe that term – but it does make it a more complex piece of cinema than some of its detractors are already claiming it to be. It certainly doesn’t lack for ambition. Or rigor, for that matter, especially when compared to Los Javis’ past works on stage, TV and film. While growing apart in their personal lives, these two have been growing up as artists, their filmmaking form developing without needing to supersede or sacrifice that peculiar mix of sensuality, earnestness and cheekiness – “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility and war is the opposite of that” and “A faggot’s heart is an ocean of mysteries” are actual lines in the movie – so typical of their work and that of other queer contemporaries.
Personally, would I have included Lorca verbalizing the importance of representation in anachronistic terms for one needless black-and-white flashback? Not really, and that goes for every glimpse of the actual Lorca in which La Bola Negra lets itself indulge. Regardless, this unapologetically queer epic works where and when it counts, as an overwhelming cinematic experience and collective catharsis for audiences, both specific and widespread if this TIFF prize is anything to go by. Its valleys are few and far between, insignificant even. Its peaks are vertiginous and plentiful, pointing out that to deny ourselves is to deny life and that, even death, in her cold unknowability, can be a generous mistress, reminding us to live, to never forget, to love and to fight. To kill the shame that festers within and liberate ourselves, our people, our histories.
La Bola Negra will enjoy Netflix’s widest and longest theatrical release for any of its titles yet, opening as a platform release on October 16 before expanding to more theaters on November 6. The film will then have its streaming debut December 2.