Somebody Give ‘La Bola Negra’ the Nobel Prize Already

I went to see La Bola Negra (The Black Ball), directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (‘Los Javis’) just as autumn’s first cool winds were sweeping a Europe battered by fire, scandal and a whole lot of fear. Ulrich Siegmund (“the most dangerous man in Germany”) and his neo-Nazi AfD party have triumphed, raising the dark banners of the far right to an unprecedented level  and cheered by those who long for the rebirth of the German empire. Corruption in Brussels is erupting in what looks like the acts of a decadent political circus. The streets of France are burning in an uncontrollable anarchy rooted in demands for what? Better education?

And Spain is under attack on several fronts. Two months ago, the city of Ceuta (population about 83,000) — along with Melilla one of Spain’s two colonial cities on the African mainland — was, and I can’t find a better word, invaded. By 80,000 Moroccans, whose country encloses the enclaves. In two days. Meanwhile, in Madrid, thousands of protesters fed up with a crushing housing crisis have been camped out for days and nights in the legendary Puerta del Sol square, a protest that Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is only too happy to turn to his advantage.

He sits at the center of an earthquake that reaches from one of his own ministers — sentenced to more than 20 years in prison — to his very wife who is under investigation for influence peddling and misuse of public funds. This is the same man who, not long ago at the UN General Assembly in New York, decided that taking “big shots” meant fake-tossing paper-balls into a wastebasket alongside Zohran Mamdani. Now he has dissolved parliament and called snap elections, hoping for a miraculous resurrection under pressure from his enemies on the right… But what does any of this have to do with a movie review? Everything.

I’m sitting in the small theater of a multiplex somewhere in  La Mancha, the heartland of Spain that gave us Don Quixote. I sit with my popcorn, soda, and  a seat in a movie theater that is straining at capacity. I think I’m the only foreigner here, though I like to believe I’m passing unnoticed — that the locals take me for just another one of their own, ready to watch what’s being hailed as a masterpiece, an epic, the most ambitious film in the history of Spanish cinema. The Oscar frontrunner, possibly, in a showdown with Nolan’s cold, cardboard Odyssey. Because neither Germany nor France nor Belgium has a cinematic event that can grab the nation’s attention and steal the headlines from  sociopolitical disasters the way La Bola Negra  has. It’s the Javis’ second feature  and here I am, deep in the Spanish heartland, wondering whether a movie supposedly about the poet García Lorca and the Civil War is worth the massive hype.

The lights go down. I have zero expectations.

Two hours and thirty-five minutes later I’m sobbing like a heartbroken teenager. And the entire audience in this theater — every last person — is crying right along with me. Holy Mother of God, I think, how the hell did these two kids make this? Not a masterpiece, no. Masterpieces are about craft. This is art. Living poetry. Hard, uninhibited, bloody, beautiful, overwhelmingly poetic. How did I get through that last hour and a half holding back this emotional explosion when I’m not Spanish, I’m not gay, I’m no big reader of Lorca, and I couldn’t care less about the Spanish Civil War? There’s one enormous WTF in my head, saturated with the images I’ve just absorbed.

Is La Bola Negra good? So good that it doesn’t deserve an Oscar, or applause on some hypocritical Hollywood night. This… thing… deserves a Nobel. It deserves to represent us. When the aliens show up with the Chupacabra, or ChatGPT wipes out Bitcoin and leaks your infidelity photos, show them this movie as proof that yes, damn it, we’re a bunch of mammals with self-destructive appetites but in spite of them, there’s something inside us — an essential, elemental spark of love, of goodness — and that, maybe, deserves another chance.

Okay, okay, hold on. I’m no García Lorca.

Finally, down to business. Let’s start with the title. La Bola Negra refers to a play of the same name that Federico García Lorca never got to complete because he was shot by Francoists in 1936, at just 38. The reasons? Being homosexual, a Republican, and a liberal with public political opinions? Maybe all of the above. But here’s where it gets interesting: right in the title. Because the black ball becomes a metaphor that applies to situations and eras that, though different, end up bound together by the helplessness and pain of something as simple as wanting to live a life, a personality of your own.

The movie opens with what could easily pass for a Sergio Leone sequence. Abandoned faces of children and the elderly in a dusty hamlet. It’s 1937. Civil War. And the protagonist appears: Sebastián. A boy who doesn’t know how to play the trumpet but is playing it anyway, alongside other village musicians, to welcome Mussolini’s Italian troops. Only it goes wrong, and death arrives so unexpectedly that, for the rest of the film, Sebastián will have to carry that weight of guilt on his back. No spoilers from me; I don’t want that guilt.

There are three stories. Three queer stories. In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes), the son of a well-off family in Granada, is obsessed — his rigid father perhaps even more than he is — with getting into an elite social club, the Casino. In 1937, Sebastián (Álvaro Lafuente, a.k.a. Guitarricadelafuente) is a young Francoist soldier assigned to guard a wounded Republican lieutenant colonel, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau). And in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a young historian and playwright with a terrible relationship with his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), has to launch an investigation that leads him to a treasure beyond his own understanding.

Each of these plots could easily stand alone as an independent film. And although at first I wondered whether one might get in the way of another, the narrative transitions Los Javis use let the past, the metafiction and the present flow in balance, feeding each other and deepening the characters. And here we have to single out the flawless performances of a remarkable ensemble. I have to give special credit to Penélope Cruz, who plays Nené Romero, a Madrid cupletista — a cabaret singer — who performs for soldiers during the Civil War. Los Javis handed her a character she has infused with a blend of sensuality, mischief and plenty of flair, in a performance that deserves applause. Her image is hard to shake: singing, weaving through men starved for company in the middle of mortal chaos. Glenn Close also turns up, near the end of the film, playing Isabelle Durand, a García Lorca scholar.

After the first half hour, the film takes off at full gallop. The three stories, three laments, trade places inside a staggering visual frame. Images  remind me of Apocalypse Now; another scene  takes me to that mysterious room where wishes come true, conjured by the Russian genius Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker. The similarities — homages, really — to landmark films are bubbling up everywhere, shot impeccably by Gris Jordana. There are shots and sequences at a creative level that defies today’s conventions. It’s as if these two filmmakers, who by their own account were a couple until, precisely, the shooting of La Bola Negra, had made not a movie but an act of liberation, a sensory one.

The score is so powerful that, mixed with the staging, the epic shots and the angles that let no detail escape, it produces an effect that is ecstatic but a little suffocating. At one point I wanted to tell them: “Turn the volume down — I’ve got my hands full just watching what’s on the screen.” But far from being a flaw, it’s an act of courage, rare in these days of political correctness,  self-censorship, and, maybe, creative mediocrity.

Suddenly, the theater is dead silent. Nobody talks. Nobody whispers. Nobody seems to move. And so, in a kind of pseudo-trance, the people witnessing the experience that is La Bola Negra give themselves over to the pain, to the poetry of Lorca, who, like a ghost, appears and disappears within the walls of three different but sadly identical eras… Desire wells up second by second… Because this is a passionate, yearning, carnal film…

The art direction paints three distant worlds, each with its own complexities. There are no mistakes. An extreme close-up of a hand, of a few fingers, says more than three lines of dialogue.

I’m holding back a cry and I don’t know where it comes from. It would be easier to write a normal review. To explain why, technically, this is the most ambitious film ever in Spanish cinema, or that just days after its release it’s the second-highest-grossing Spanish film of the year, behind only Torrente Presidente… but that would be boring, and an insult to what I lived in that theater. Because when you tell yourself, finally, it’s over — not because you’re tired but because you want to breathe, to celebrate Los Javis — that’s when García Lorca’s artillery opens fire, for a final stretch that touches the human soul. You don’t have to be Spanish, or gay, or know anything about poetry or the Civil War, to be affected, to feel cornered by art laid bare in a universal way.

And then, yes: when Lorca himself appears, the room fills with a symphony of sounds… the crying like a fraternal communion. Because every human being has their own inner war, their own griefs. There, in that last act, I was able to reconnect with the pain of knowing that my reality is this exile, and that going back to my country, eating arepas, seeing my friends and family again… is almost a mirage… And, as I have many times before, though never in an experience like this one, I celebrated, amid fragmented memories… and then the snow. The film’s last stretch dissolves into pure white, after all that darkness, after the black ball and all it stood for. A white ending to a journey through the farthest edges of emotion. And I celebrated the idea that cinema, that all the arts, should be exactly this: the refuge where our souls find their deepest consolation.

Outside the theater, the world is still waiting. Paris is still burning. In Brussels, you can hear the howls of a political class rotting from the inside. And in Madrid, the Socialist  Sánchez seems to have more lives than a cat. For him, the sun also rises, as Hemingway might say. But none of it matters. Because La Bola Negra keeps rolling toward its unstoppable destiny… toward the memories yet to come.