The Black Ball Is a Sometimes Sublime, Sometimes Clumsy Look at Gay Men Across a Century

The Black Ball is an ecstatic, imperfect ode to the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, though it bears little resemblance to a staid biopic. Lorca himself, played by Alberto Cortés, only makes an appearance late in the film, when it has finally wound its way into his presence not long before his death at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Rather than be about Lorca directly, The Black Ball braids together the lives of three gay men in 1932, 1937, and 2017, gradually revealing their connections to him and to each other as it goes along. It’s a film about laying claim to Lorca as a gay man in addition to an artist and a political figure, insisting that his sexuality is as key to his legacy as any other aspect of his life. While that may not seem like a controversial point, The Black Ball makes a compelling case for Spanish history as remaining mired in masculine posturing, shame, and self-defensive erasure to the point where a visiting Lorca scholar who turns up halfway through the film, and who’s played by a (Spanish speaking!) Glenn Close, is commended as part of a tradition of the greatest Hispanists coming from outside the country.

The Black Ball is itself mighty compelling, though it’s also the kind of film that feels weightier during the watching than it does when looked back on the next day, when in retrospect its achievements start to seem like they might have been outstripped by its considerable ambitions. (The film received an exuberant reaction at Cannes, where it premiered.) The second feature from creative (and former romantic) partners Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, also known as Los Javis, it represents a considerable step up in terms of budget and scope from the pair’s directorial debut, Holy Camp!, an adaptation of their own stage musical about two reggaeton-loving teenage girls who get sent to a Catholic church camp. Still, it shares an earnestness with that more modest endeavor that’s practically a superpower, fueling the film through stretches and exchanges that, at the hands of someone more self-conscious, would come across as clunky or corny. The Black Ball is named after an unfinished work by Lorca about a young man who gets blackballed for suspected homosexuality when he applies for membership to his father’s casino. But those few surviving pages are more of a writing prompt for the Javis and their collaborator on the screenplay, Alberto Conejero, who wrote a play about Lorca and his lover Rafael Rodríguez Rapún that serves equally as source material.

Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) turns up in the middle timeline of the movie, as a wounded prisoner of war being held captive by the Nationalist forces until he heals up enough to be interrogated and, almost certainly, executed. It’s there that he meets the story line’s hapless hero, Sebastián, played by musical artist Guitarricadelafuente (who also makes a cameo in Bitter Christmas but who really makes you feel the degree to which he’s taking on his first real acting role here). Sebastián is a would-be musician whose affiliation with the Nationalists is more a matter of fate than any affinity toward fascism — they were the soldiers who picked him up on the road after his village got strafed by the Italians they were waiting outside to celebrate. An almost comically meek type, Sebastián hasn’t given much thought to political ideals or anything else beyond his sheltered world view, but as a noncommittal soldier tasked with guarding Rafael while he recuperates, he slowly has his eyes opened up to his own desires as well as to the possibilities of the world. Meanwhile, in the 1932 story line, Milo Quifes plays the similarly young but far less naïve Carlos, Lorca’s abbreviated protagonist, who pals around with anarchists, Marxists, and openly gay men but who can’t break free from his desire to please his father by seeking approval from the conservative powers that be by pretending to be someone he’s not.

Completing the film’s triptych is Alberto (Carlos González), an Eeyore-esque history grad student who lives with his boyfriend (Julio Torres) in Madrid, who’s been collecting records of forgotten transgressive music from the 1920s for his thesis when he gets a call about the death of the maternal grandfather he didn’t know was still alive. Alberto, with his Grindr trawls and his strained relationship with his erratic mother (Lola Dueñas), is the only one of the film’s three protagonists who feels entirely solid, because Carlos is fictional and basically symbolic but also because The Black Ball can’t help but treat the past as a mythical space even when it wants to portray it as vivid and textured and as alive with emotions as the present. It’s in the past that The Black Ball has its most ponderous moments but also when it achieves bursts of true grandeur, like the scene of a day-drunk and temporarily liberated Carlos flinging himself into a flamenco song at the local bar, or the sequence in which Penélope Cruz makes a spectacular entrance as a bawdy singer for the soldiers who is effectively Sebastián’s cis fairy drag mother. When the Javis reach for the sky, they achieve something that approaches the transcendent, and that can make you overlook the fact that this is also a film in which Lorca tells his former lover, sounding remarkably like someone about to post an informative slideshow on Instagram, that he thinks his newest work “could help people like us.”