Some flowers bloom in the dark. just Black Ball (or Black Ball) begins, the rounded edges of the screen frame old postcard photos from the Spanish Civil War. A slick, black-and-white montage features attractive young soldiers and sailors, their uniforms painted hot pink—a tongue-in-cheek gesture somewhere between imposition and revelation of a stolen, forgotten strangeness. This is how the film approaches its broad historical fiction, but the core of its imposition is not that of projecting strangeness where none existed. Rather, it reimagines (boldly and to the point) lost works of art and real stories left in ellipsis. Either way, the film’s take on the strange story is that of a force deeply and inextricably intertwined 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.
Divided between three distinct timelines, whose connections gradually become clearer, the film by the directors Javier Ambrose AND Javier Calvo– who are collectively known as Los Javis and were awarded Best Director at Cannes FatherlandPaweł Pawlikowski – brings Spanish gay history to life by extracting it from whispers and lost writings. She turns these into painful poems etched on a large cinematic canvas. One story begins in 1937, with a village naively associated with Mussolini being bombed from the air by the very nationalists they hoped to welcome. This vicious prologue sees one of the sole survivors of the massacre – a frail and sensitive man named Sebastián (musician Guitarricadelafuente in his first film role) – joining this fascist group for self-preservation, despite the fact that they had killed his mother.
Elsewhere, in 1932 Granada, a father-son story of hidden identities and class divisions unfolds in more operatic tones. A brave young man named Carlos (Milo Quifes) attempts to join the ranks of a fancy casino and social club, only to be denied by its senior members—they vote him down by choosing black balls; the origin of the term “blackballing” – because of rumors that he is a homosexual. And finally, nearly a century later in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a curvaceous Spanish historian in Athens, randomly scrolls Grindr for a hookup while trying to decide on a thesis topic for his PhD. This also ends up being a family drama, as Alberto learns of a secret ancestry through an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew, although it is told in a more restrained and realistic way than the two previous stories.
Slowly, and then with forceful abandon, these parallel tales cross-pollinate through aesthetic echoes, their sounds and images pouring into each other at every temporal leap, despite their different styles. While the film’s modern tale is of an openly gay man prosaically searching for purpose, his Civil War story is one of closeted self-discovery – village bumpkin Sebastián has barely been exposed to queer ideas – while the casino saga surrounds the question of whether Carlos will stand up, or lie about it, regardless of how he accepts the damage.
Eagle-eyed viewers (and those familiar with gay Spanish poetry) will recognize the latter as a filmed version of the incomplete scene from which the film takes its name, written by Federico García Lorca. The playwright himself is an invisible, unseen presence for most of the film, existing as a spiritual observer just beyond the frame (he had been murdered in 1936). Still, the historical fiction of Los Javis realizes the themes of hidden desire that Lorca often dealt with, even though his eponymous play would have been the first with an overtly queer protagonist, had it been completed.
This sense of loss and subjugated history equally informs Sebastián’s narrative, where he is tasked with guarding a prisoner of war from the rival Spanish Republican faction, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a handsome gay rebel drawn from history and with a real connection to Lorca. It’s not long before Sebastián becomes involved with Rafael, in ways he still doesn’t understand. However, these themes of oppression first appear in opposition to Alberto’s weaker contemporary saga. Its focus is an openly gay man who slowly comes to terms with his own personal and political history, and in the process, contextualizes the film’s early 20th-century stories as an often-ignored continuum.
The film’s three threads, tonally distinct, are linked with a sense of occasion and momentum that centers gay history—not just as a series of factoids, but as distinct emotional currents that Los Javis compel their viewers to grasp from the plot. In their view, gay history is a suggestion of anonymity and subjugation, of desire so hot it burns a hole in you, of emotional self-harm and ultimately of strained family ties. It’s even a spectacle, as Carlos engages in frustration-fueled musical fun. Meanwhile, Sebastián becomes an observer of (and an oblique participant in) the small tale of burlesque performer Nené (Penélope Cruz in a thunderous film), whose artistic expression is co-opted by state militarism—a subplot treated with a more critical eye than the other queer contests at Cannes. cowardly. However, Nene’s kindness to Sebastián also begins to expand his understanding of the world. For example, she is the first person to alert her to the existence of transgender people and performers, of whom she says: “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. Struggle is the opposite.”
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BLACK BALL ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
This notion is key to Los Javis’s powerful deconstruction of history, in which queerness is clearly a distinct social and political identity, and yet one that the filmmakers regard as intrinsic to civilization. In a world now torn between oblivion and survival—manifested as two early 20th-century men struggling with their places in unstable societies—she fits naturally into the sharp dynamic between violence and self-loathing. If strangeness didn’t exist, a world at war would have to invent it just to quell the threat of gentleness.
For Alberto, the modern and occasionally spoiled man whose story comes out uncomfortably, Black Ball threatens to engage in a finger-pointing lecture on how good modern gays have it compared to the travails of their ancestors. However, he resists this accommodating instinct by having Alberto discover and engage with the film’s other stories – alongside his fragile family ties and his relationship with his estranged mother (Lola Duenasperforming with uneasy naturalism). In the process, Alberto’s tale also becomes one of belonging, as he slowly finds his place not only in modern society, but within the last century of Spanish history, and – with the help of a historian Lorca played by Glenn Close– within a tradition of expressive art and poetry swept away by shame.
Queer art has always existed on the margins, and while Black BallIts aesthetic approach defies this notion – it’s as mundane and digestible in form as the studio’s greatest classics – which is also one of its most poignant aspects. Its acquisition by new streamer Netflix speaks to the bare-bones sentimentality at play and the film’s potential broad reach, but it also represents art imitating life in random ways. Black Ball re-imagines and constructs art from the margins (including a play about Lorca by co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero), but transforms it into the kind of lavish, expensive film production that, in years past, would never have been given to a queer drama. But like the film’s modern discoveries of the past—which work to contextualize historical upheaval—its imminent release to a mass audience comes pre-loaded with memories, courtesy of a narrative that prompts the modern viewer to consider the long and winding road to this relatively strange normality. The fact that Alberto can live such an ordinary life becomes imbued with wonderful qualities.
Los Javis’s film is not radical in form but traditional, retroactively made powerful in the process by its liberated sense of scale—as if the shackles of financial constraints were no longer a factor in cinema like it. Granted, no film can change the landscape that quickly, but this is the rare time that a queer film has felt like insider art, without the need for compromise. By the time he dares to re-imagine the lost pages of Lorca’s drama, everything becomes a conversation with history itself, literalized through the powerful personification of nature, which further captures its saga of transformative context and transformative desire.
Without giving too much away: a poem appears early in the film’s sprawling 155-minute run that one of the central characters doesn’t fully understand until he’s endured the loss and pain his lines speak of. Black Ball similarly justifies its existence, like such a Rorschach test. The film’s creators, like its characters, seem to hope that their work will not be a necessary consolation in decades, from the belief that radical change is not only possible, but constantly ongoing. But until such a moment arrives, making films like this one less urgent through perpetual progress, Los Javis have created a terrifying war epic that doubles internal and external conflicts on the precipice of global change, in ways that make the soul – making it more open and able to bear witness to its joys and sorrows and to understand its own strength and phrase.
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