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\n The second feature from the Javis set Cannes aflame, but will it play the same way once it\u2019s picked up for theaters?
\n Photo: Cannes Film Festival\n <\/p>\n
The Black Ball is an ecstatic, imperfect ode to the Spanish poet Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, though it bears little resemblance to a staid biopic. Lorca himself, played by Alberto Cort\u00e9s, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s played by a (Spanish speaking!) Glenn Close, is commended as part of a tradition of the greatest Hispanists coming from outside the country.<\/p>\n
The Black Ball is itself mighty compelling, though it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 Rodr\u00edguez Rap\u00fan that serves equally as source material.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s there that he meets the story line\u2019s hapless hero, Sebasti\u00e1n, played by musical artist Guitarricadelafuente (who also makes a cameo in Bitter Christmas<\/a> but who really makes you feel the degree to which he\u2019s taking on his first real acting role here). Sebasti\u00e1n is a would-be musician whose affiliation with the Nationalists is more a matter of fate than any affinity toward fascism \u2014 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, Sebasti\u00e1n hasn\u2019t 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 na\u00efve Carlos, Lorca\u2019s abbreviated protagonist, who pals around with anarchists, Marxists, and openly gay men but who can\u2019t break free from his desire to please his father by seeking approval from the conservative powers that be by pretending to be someone he\u2019s not.<\/p>\n Completing the film\u2019s triptych is Alberto (Carlos Gonz\u00e1lez), an Eeyore-esque history grad student who lives with his boyfriend (Julio Torres) in Madrid, who\u2019s 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\u2019t know was still alive. Alberto, with his Grindr trawls and his strained relationship with his erratic mother (Lola Due\u00f1as), is the only one of the film\u2019s three protagonists who feels entirely solid, because Carlos is fictional and basically symbolic but also because The Black Ball can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 Pen\u00e9lope Cruz makes a spectacular entrance as a bawdy singer for the soldiers who is effectively Sebasti\u00e1n\u2019s 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 \u201ccould help people like us.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n