In the urgent heat of a long-awaited embrace, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) turns to Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) and quietly whispers: “No one disappears completely.” The words, which turn the roles of victim and captive on their head, also epitomise the work of Spanish mavericks Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, the duo known as Los Javis and whose art is intricately tied to the lifesaving quality of memory. This idea is never clearer than in La Bola Negra (The Black Ball), a film that works at once as a siren and a buoy, issuing an alert to those who so mindlessly partake in the flimsy freedoms of modernity while keeping a firm grip on an earnest sense of hope.
Loosely adapted from the work of renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca – who is also briefly brought back to life on screen – this wildly ambitious period drama is split into three alternating timelines. Rafael and Sebastián both physically belong to 1937 despite craving the liberties of a future still far ahead. The former an orphaned young soldier forced to serve under the Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, the latter a Republican fighter sent by destiny to heal under his kind guard.
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This fated encounter ripples through eight decades, seeping into the life of Alberto (Carlos González) in 2017. The budding playwright sees his lulling routine in Madrid sharply pierced by an unexpected call announcing his right to a mysterious inheritance that will lead him to Glenn Close’s pompous historian, Isabelle, and a cathartic reckoning with his past and self. Meanwhile, in 1932, an anxious Carlos (Milo Quifes) is at the mercy of a select group of men whose initiation ceremony at the town’s exclusive casino gives the film its title.
Like The Secret Agent the year before, La Bola Negra acutely understands that a political reckoning can only come from a place of critical devotion for one’s country and people. Los Javis measure no words in condemning Spain’s affiliation to the Nationalist movements taking over Europe ahead of World War Two. That same sharp criticism is applied to the present day, with the film noting how a national sense of prudishness has forbidden Spaniards from grasping how the dichotomy between the hunger of desire and the starvation of polite society has fuelled their country’s greatest art — while also leading to a painful ostracisation of their artists.
The directing duo has long shown a reverence for women, lovingly capturing their female characters as beautiful and complex pillars of this world made by them, but still perceived to belong to men. While men are the central focus of La Bola Negra, Los Javis remain faithful to their old allegiance by surrounding their male characters with women who act as walking reminders of their thesis. Alberto’s mother, a bitter addict at first glance, unravels as the personification of their Spain – a matriarch supposed to nurture her children but far too calloused by a past she is unable to gain perspective from to reach that tender core.
Calvo and Ambrossi strike a winning blow by casting Penélope Cruz as their cupletista, the highly theatrical performers who left the realm of the underground Spanish cabarets to entertain troupes during the war. The actress arrives in the film as a rocket, her textured voice thundering from within her bustier-wearing frame as a mating call to rouse the sex-famished soldiers. A starry addition to the directors’ growing roster of queer godmothers, the Almodóvar muse who has represented a Spaniard ideal of femininity since the 90s is fittingly tasked with delivering perhaps the film’s trickiest line. Coming from the lips of almost anyone else, the warning would be nauseatingly saccharine, but, enunciated by Cruz as if a sommelier, it finds much-needed gravity: “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite.”
As its knotted ends begin to untangle with great dramatic flair, La Bola Negra pulls off a feat of alchemy: to demonstrate the wondrous non-linear approach of a film such as Cloud Atlas while helping exorcise the Croisette from the cursed ghost of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez. Safe from a brief wobble in tone following an electrifying opening chapter, this decades-spanning love odyssey is as impressive as it is moving, grabbing at the visceral nature of Lorca’s genre-bending work to mould its staggeringly boisterous cinematic equivalent.