La Bola Negra | Picturehouse Recommends

Dir: JAVIER CALVO, JAVIER AMBROSSI
Cast: GUITARRICADELAFUENTE, MILO QUIFES, CARLOS GONZÁLEZ, PENÉLOPE CRUZ, GLENN CLOSE
155 mins · · Cert 15
Generating a deafening amount of awards buzz this season, very few films can match the power and ambition of La Bola Negra. The second feature by co-directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi following 2017's outlandish musical comedy Holy Camp! – is a high-intensity emotional drama that explores queer identity with such panache that you won't quite know what's hit you.
Calvo and Ambrossi, who jointly won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, truly announce themselves with La Bola Negra. A time-hopping, genre-straddling trio of stories, it comes inspired by the work and life of left-wing gay writer Federico García Lorca, who was killed in 1936 by right-wing militias during the Spanish Civil War.
Chronologically, the first segment, set in 1932, realises a titular unfinished Lorca work. In it, Milo Quifes plays Carlos, a young, closeted man from a well-to-do family in Granada. His application for membership to a plush casino is rejected – or "black balled" – with the committee suspecting he's gay. If this hints at the trials faced by so many, the second segment lays it all bare, taking its cue from Alberto Conejero's 2023 play La Piedra Oscura.
It is set five years later, in the heat of Spain's civil war, and begins as the Republican-leaning Sebastián (singer Guitarricadelafuente) is forced to join a Nationalist army to survive after the brutal bombing of his village. Once there, he forms a tentative bond with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), who in reality was both Lorca's lover and a former football player. Giving Conejero a co-writing credit, the team rewrite history in the most daring fashion.
Interwoven in exhilarating fashion, the third section, in 2017, focuses on gay academic Alberto (Carlos González), left to ponder unexpected familial revelations that send him snaking back into the past, and to the 1930s stories just described. It's a deft and fluid structure all right, confidently executed to create a profound tapestry-like exploration of memory, loss, identity and gay rights.
Amongst it all, there are some delightful cameos. Penélope Cruz pitches up as a sassy nightclub act, entertaining the Nationalist troops, while Glenn Close is an American historian and Lorca scholar. Truly, though, it's the lesser-known performers who explode on screen, with rising Spanish star Bernardeau and Guitarricadelafuente, in his first screen role, utterly magical. The result is both boldly cinematic and emotionally devastating.