{"id":658302,"date":"2026-05-22T10:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T10:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/658302\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T10:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T10:45:09","slug":"la-bola-negra-review-javier-calvo-and-javier-ambrossis-romantic-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/658302\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018La Bola Negra\u2019 Review: Javier Calvo And Javier Ambrossi’s Romantic Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNothing says \u201cI love you\u201d like a bullet to the heart in Javier Calvo<\/a> and Javier Ambrossi<\/a>\u2019s La Bola Negra<\/a> (The Black Ball), an unashamedly romantic decades-spanning drama that emerged in the last days of a very austere Cannes<\/a> Film Festival as a possible dark horse Palme d\u2019Or winner. It\u2019s long even by Cannes standards, and requires an awful lot of very specific cultural knowledge (start brushing up on Spanish history and literature now), but the level of craft is extraordinary, notably in the way three very distinct timelines \u2014 1937, 1932 and 2017, in that order \u2014 are woven together seamlessly.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first timeline introduces us to Sebasti\u00e1n (musician Guitarricadelafuente making his acting debut) in 1937; a trumpet player with a military band. The Spanish Civil War is in full swing, and Sebasti\u00e1n is part of a welcoming party organized by his village, believing that Mussolini\u2019s men are coming to liberate them. They are, indeed, coming but not to liberate them. As bullets and bombs rain down from an aerial attack, Sebasti\u00e1n takes off amid the chaos and is taken in by a traveling band of Nationalist soldiers.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second timeline, 1932, is fictional, and this is where we meet Carlos (Milo Quifes). Carlos is on his way to the casino, turning down his mother\u2019s offer of his favorite lunch and proceeding with such purpose that his head is barely turned by a parade of the gayest matelots since Pierre et Gilles\u2019 2005 book Sailors & Sea. Carlos is applying for membership of the casino, but his confidence does not last long \u2014 he is blackballed by the committee, to the dismay of his father (blink and you\u2019ll miss Antonio de la Torre), on the grounds of some\u2026 well, rumors.<\/p>\n

\n\tLastly, we come to 2017, where Alberto (Carlos Gonz\u00e1lez) is leading a very messy life, having abandoned his career as a playwright to collect rare pre-war records and pursue random gay sex through Grindr. Alberto learns that his grandfather has recently died, which comes as a surprise since he believed that he was already dead. But when he confronts his mother, Teresa (Lola Due\u00f1as), she gets angry, and tells him not to involve himself in the reading of her father\u2019s will. But Alberto goes anyway, and his inheritance (in all possible meanings of the word) is contained in a brown envelope, some scraps of paper that take on an awful amount of significance over the next two hours.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, the story cracks on, largely following Sebasti\u00e1n as he becomes part of a mixed Spanish-Italian platoon and is put in charge of a handsome POW, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau). Sebasti\u00e1n becomes infatuated with Rafael, falling in love him in much the same way \u2014 we later learn \u2014 as the poet Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca once did. Lorca, murdered in 1938, is key to the film\u2019s central mystery, but the film still has some way to go yet, and there are plenty more secrets still to be discovered (to heavily paraphrase a line near the end, the heart of a gay man is \u201can ocean full of secrets\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tLorca\u2019s ghost hangs heavy over the film, and his poetry doesn\u2019t always translate (at the Cannes press screening, even the French and English subtitles often seemed at odds with one another). There\u2019s also an awful lot of snow, and references to snow \u2014 hint: in the 1918 poem Autumn Song, he wrote \u201cWill the snow melt when Death carries us off?\u201d \u2014 which sends the film off on a new, cryptic magic-realist tangent when Carlos\u2019s story should be wrapping up. The vagaries of the Civil War are also hard to intuit at times. Nevertheless, La Bola Negra has an unshakeable self-confidence that keeps all the working parts moving, and if the rumors are true that the directors were editing up to the wire, it\u2019s possible that the film might yet be streamlined for release.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs its 20-minute ovation showed, there is certainly an appetite for a new kind of gay love story this year at Cannes, where Jordan Firstman\u2019s similarly disarming Club Kid left grown women in tears. This kind of inclusivity would explain Glenn Close<\/a>\u2018s appearance \u2014 as a visiting literary scholar \u2014 at just the right moment, as well as Pen\u00e9lope Cruz<\/a>\u2019s showstopping cameo as Nen\u00e9, a singer-slash-hooker who schools Sebasti\u00e1n on the then-nascent form of the modern transgender movement.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe behind-the-scenes involvement of Pedro and Augustin Almod\u00f3var is also significant in this regard; La Bola Negra certainly reflects the broad church of their production company El Deseo and very much follows Almodovar Snr. in its use of melodrama and the convoluted algebra of desire that configures whenever two or more people fall in love. Almod\u00f3var tried something similar himself, in the closing scenes of 2015\u2019s Parallel Mothers and his tribute to the missing of the Civil War. La Bola Negra not only succeeds where he failed, it takes the Almod\u00f3varian concept of romantic love to the next logical level \u2014and hopefully to the next audience \u2014 as Spanish cinema continues to evolve in his wake.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle:\u00a0La Bola Negra
Festival:\u00a0Cannes (Competition)
Directors\/Screenwriters:\u00a0Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi
Cast:\u00a0Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos Gonz\u00e1lez, Pen\u00e9lope Cruz, Glenn Close, Milo Quifes, Lola Due\u00f1as
Sales:\u00a0Goodfellas
Running time:\u00a02 hrs 35 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nothing says \u201cI love you\u201d like a bullet to the heart in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi\u2019s La…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[18451,32176,88,86204,283632,283633,283178,206,203635,899],"class_list":["post-658302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-glenn-close","tag-javier-ambrossi","tag-javier-calvo","tag-la-bola-negra","tag-movies","tag-penu00e9lope-cruz","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}