La Bola Negra review: Memory, love and legacy in extraordinary work of cinema

The easiest way to sell to an Australian audience a sweeping Spanish-language love epic is to place it in competition with English-language films.

The assumption is that you have to really work to persuade English speakers to read subtitles, so you’ll hear a lot about La Bola Negra as a top Oscar contender against the likes of presumed frontrunners The Odyssey, Wild Horse Nine and Project Hail Mary.

Because if it’s an international feature, it’s already working from behind, so if it’s already been vaunted into that elite tier, then there must be something really special about it. That conversation is a shorthand for “pay attention, there’s something here you should know about”.

La Bola Negra is really special. It’s a beautiful, grand and emotionally poignant film that is captivating, provocative, thoughtful, looks amazing and actually makes you feel something.

You don’t even have to ask how rare that combination is because we all know it is.

Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the film works as a triptych with a thread that ties them together.

The main story of the three is set in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Sebastian (Guitarricadelafuente) is a young man who witnesses everyone in his village being slaughtered – “by mistake” – is essentially forced into serving with the Nationalist forces.

He is assigned to guard a wounded Republican prisoner of war, Rafael Rodriguez Rapun (Miguel Bernardeau), who was once part of a theatre company alongside gay poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Spending time with Rafael awakens his desires.

In an earlier timeline, in 1932, a young man, Carlos (Milo Quifes), is black-balled by a membership society in Granada because of persistent rumours of his homosexuality. He has to decide whether to lie and deny his true self for acceptance.

In 2017, Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez) is a former playwright who discovers a grandfather he didn’t even know was alive has recently died and left him something to fulfil a long-ago lapsed promise.

The stories are connected in a way that is not shocking or a twist, but still not something you want to know if you’re watching it for the first time. The slow drip-feed of the reveal is part of the many pleasures of this wonderful film.

There are also supporting performances from more internationally recognisable stars including Penelope Cruz, Glenn Close and Julio Torres, but they are here to serve the main stories and not to overstage them.

Like many great works of Spanish cinema, La Bola Negra is a story about memory and legacy, of the things and people who were denied the freedom of truth and reckoning, and those reverberations linger in the present.

There have been many films made about or in conversation with the history of 20th and 21st century Spain as it was shaped by the Spanish Civil War – Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana, Carlos Saura’s The Hunt, Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers – because the project of historical memory is never finished.

Especially when it’s used as a political football to deny or reinforce a particular ideology and agenda. In Spain, the right-wing is again on the ascendency, so official and unofficial pushes for truth, reconciliation and redress could be paused or regressed.

It’s a scar that can never heal, a national identity that can never be made whole.

A film such as La Bola Negra is part of that conversation, and here, Calvo and Ambrossi (nicknamed Los Javis) layers into that existing national trauma the untold story of the queer community within that framework.

It’s not an injection or appropriation, the point is that those tales were always there, they just weren’t allowed to be told. The film is based in part on real people such as Lorca and Rapun, their actual stories cut violently short.

Despite the gravity of the subject, La Bola Negra is not weighed down by heaviness. There is a lightness, a euphoria here, most notably in the 1937 section which cinematically evokes the likes of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient and Claire Denis’s seminal film Beau Travail.

La Bola Negra’s sequences of military bodies in motion are genuinely hypnotic and feel like we’re being let in on a conversation with Denis’s film about masculinity and belonging – and exclusion. It invites you to consider, not to make quick judgements.

Everything here fits together like a symphony – the magnificent, compassionate performance from Guitarricadelafuente, the gorgeous cinematography by Gris Jordana, the textured score by Raul Refree and the humanist-led approach by Los Javis.

When you consider La Bola Negra was made for €15 million, it engenders great hope that cinema as an artform can survive – and must.

This is truly an extraordinary film, one that will further enrich with repeated viewings. You’ll be rushing back to watch it again and again.

Rating: 4.5/5

La Bola Negra is in cinemas