Sebastián and Rafael are not the only characters of note. Ambrossi and Calvo go by the two-in-one moniker Los Javis, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that they approach their narrative in a similar spirit of multitasking compression. The movie consists of three stories, set in three different time frames, and unfurls them simultaneously, in a hyper-controlled frenzy of crosscutting. Sebastián’s tale, adapted from the play “La Piedra Oscura,” by Alberto Conejero (who is credited as Ambrossi and Calvo’s co-writer), is the most substantial of the three, and the other two stories coil around it tightly, like tensile vines. Not long after meeting Sebastián, we are whisked off to Granada, in 1932, where Carlos (Milo Quifes), a reserved, elegantly dressed young man, applies for membership at an exclusive casino. But the casino committee rejects his bid, owing, we later learn, to cruel yet accurate rumors of his homosexuality: “Bola negra, bola negra, bola negra” goes the refrain, as one damning black ball after another rolls down the pike. Carlos’s rich, image-conscious father orders him to return to the casino the next day and refute the suspicions. His mother, a more quietly supportive soul, encourages him to move to Madrid, where he can live more freely.
We get a bracing taste of that liberation in the third strand: it’s 2017, and Alberto (Carlos González), a Madrid-based historian, need only look to Grindr to satisfy an urge (“Sex now,” he types, before he’s uttered a word). Quite the contrast with Carlos, who must stalk some potential trade through the streets at night, and with Sebastián, whose throat goes dry at the mere sight of Rafael’s bare chest. You could argue that Ambrossi and Calvo are old-school romantics at heart, alive to the teasing thrill of the forbidden, and accordingly skeptical of the modern age and its all too convenient spoils. Alberto himself seems nostalgic for the tensions of a crueller bygone era, if the thesis that he’s writing—it involves queer dissident musicians from the nineteen-twenties—is any indication.
A knottier research project awaits him. Alberto learns that his grandfather—whom his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), was bitterly estranged from and never introduced her son to—has recently died and left him a curious inheritance, a mystery that needs untangling. The answers, the viewer can probably guess, will bring the 1932 and 1937 chapters into unifying focus, and although González makes Alberto an engaging enough sleuth, he can’t transcend the passive, puzzle-solving function that the character has been assigned. In the words of Alberto’s concerned boyfriend (Julio Torres), revealing more about the film’s shortcomings than he perhaps intends, “Isn’t it funny that the only story you don’t care about is your own?”
Before “La Bola Negra” won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (an honor it shared, hilariously, with Paweł Pawlikowski’s exquisitely minimalist “Fatherland”), Ambrossi and Calvo were known for many things. They were a Spanish-entertainment power couple for more than a decade before ending their relationship late last year. Their past collaborations include several TV series—including the popular “Veneno,” a portrait of the transgender sex worker and entertainer Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez—and a feature film from 2017, “La Llamada,” adapted from their own stage musical. They are also card-carrying cinephiles, as their recent interviews have taken pains to flaunt: “La Bola Negra,” they’ve said, carries the artistic DNA of wartime-youth classics such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1963) and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1987), and also Claire Denis’s masterwork of soldier-sublimated eroticism, “Beau Travail” (2000). My own mind drifted toward other great films, including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Three Times” (2006), a century-spanning trilogy that at once preserves and subverts the boundaries of linear time, and Terence Davies’s “Benediction” (2022), a wrenching biographical portrait of a war veteran and poet who regards his own same-sex desires with profound ambivalence.
But the queer art-house touchstone I’ve heard referenced most often in connection with “La Bola Negra” is Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” (2002), a mutually unflattering comparison if ever there was one. In both films, everything comes in threes, the incessant crosscutting is accorded a flashy metaphysical weight, and time itself is manipulated, distorted, and rearranged to the point of meaninglessness. The complexities of human longing across the ages are not explored so much as solved, in the manner of a mathematical proof. But what, exactly, is being proved here? The universality of suffering? The magic of editing? Perhaps it’s simply that the most self-consciously expansive films are so often the most reductive, the most diagrammatic—and, incidentally, the most inclined to take refuge in a great artist’s shadow. “The Hours” framed itself as a morbidly repressed valentine to Virginia Woolf, and “La Bola Negra,” with uncloseted exuberance, hitches itself to the mantle of another queer literary giant, Federico García Lorca. Although Lorca isn’t granted his own narrative, his life and legacy—the passion of his left-wing activism, the subversiveness of his art, and the open secret of his homosexuality—make up the tissue that connects all three of the film’s stories.
English (US) ·