‘The Black Ball’ Cannes Review: Los Javis’ Thrilling Gay Epic

During the frightened, lonely days of the pandemic, the Spanish television series Veneno — a biography of a famous trans singer — arrived in the States and warmed up the days of those who encountered it. The series was created by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, a creative duo (and former couple) known in their native country as Los Javis. Their style is lively and sentimental, but unafraid of edge and darkness. They are, in some ways, children of Pedro Almodóvar, similarly enamored of memory and melodrama but also individual, offering something refreshingly youthful and decidedly theirs. That developing craft is on bountiful display in their new film The Black Ball (La Bola Negra), a triptych gay epic that spans decades and tangles with a particularly grim time in modern Spanish history. 

The Black Ball opens in 1937, where a rural village loyal to Nationalist rebels is holding a celebration to welcome their Italian allies. Only, when the planes fly overhead, they strafe the villagers with bullets and send bombs whining down into buildings. Many are killed, but one young man, Sebastián (the singer Guitarricadelafuente, making a promising acting debut), scrambles to safety, only to be conscripted into the fascist army.

Five years earlier, with revolution approaching, another young man, Carlos (the striking Milo Quifes), drowns his sorrows after being black-balled from his father’s social club due to unseemly rumors about his sexual proclivities.

And in 2017, a gay writer and historian, Alberto (a terrific Carlos González), learns that a grandfather he didn’t know he had has left him something in his will — a document that will crucially link his story to the past. How these three plots intersect is the mystery of the film, a connectivity that’s compellingly explored. 

The 1937 section is the center around which the other two orbit, a sad, violent almost-romance between Sebastián and a leftist prisoner, a handsome former soccer player and actor named Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), who will almost certainly be executed as soon as he gives up the information sought by his interrogators. Sebastián is charged with befriending Rafael so that he might start talking, but it is clear from Sebastián’s furtive glances at Rafael’s wounded but still beautiful body that some other motive is soon guiding this accidental soldier.

Whatever bond the two form has more to do with the unspoken than anything uttered aloud; Los Javis keep their conversations brief, elusive. But a wealth of feeling palpably passes between them, Bernardeau hauntingly communicating Rafael’s resignation to his fate and Guitarricadelafuente expressively illustrating Sebastián’s dawning realization about his sexuality, and about what kind of people his side of things — which he didn’t choose — is brutally working to snuff out. 

The film is a consideration of so much lost gay history, an acknowledgment of what it must have been for men of a dangerous and repressive era to find themselves helplessly drawn to one another, war and other horrors informing their lives but failing to wholly destroy what is so powerful and innate within them. Watching the film, I thought of Alan Hollinghurst’s gorgeous novel The Sparsholt Affair, which traces a lineage of gay men across a century, noting the massive societal differences between eras while highlighting the enduring similarities, the perhaps universal and timeless pleasures of love and community blossoming in the margins. 

Los Javis execute this mighty vision with thrilling technical bravado. Nearly every shot in the film is a carefully composed wonder, either an eye-popping still-life tableau or a breathtaking bit of camera movement, all done up in lush, expensive-looking period detail. It’s a dazzlingly assured film, delivering the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious actually land its nervy attempt.

One comes to festivals like Cannes partly to witness the arrival of major new filmmakers, and The Black Ball is just such an event. Los Javis shrewdly and gracefully toggle between timelines and know just when to add a sly and surprising joke lest a scene tilt into turgidity. (There is a particularly funny and profane riff on a line from Titanic, for example.) The film earns its high drama by so fully and persuasively immersing us in its world and its ideas, grabbing us with its paean to those who have lived fully in even the most dire of circumstances. And yet, the collateral damage that self-assertion can cause is also considered — women are not forgotten in the picture. 

As the film’s three plotlines thematically converge, Los Javis risk a certain kind of hubris. The specter of Federico García Lorca, the gay leftist writer who was assassinated at the start of the war, rises up on the film’s horizon like a wise and benevolent moon, like a patron-saint emblem of all the film’s beauty and struggle. We learn that one of the three sections is, actually, the manifestation of an unfinished play that the author was writing just before his death. Los Javis boldly endeavor to essentially invent new Lorca text in order to complete that work. Some might call that arrogance. But they sold me on the conceit, successfully evoking Lorca’s particular poeticism to tether the film’s grand fiction to the heavy stones of real history. 

From that grounding, The Black Ball creates outsized, gregarious cinema. Music blares around these men as they stagger and reel on seasides and mountaintops, in bustling cities and stark military outposts. Los Javis lavishly fill the frame with pretty faces — Carlos’ curtains of hair partially shrouding his tortured-angel features; Rafael’s sturdy, inviting, clean-cut masculinity — and toss in a pair of for-the-gays cameos in the form of Penélope Cruz, as a bawdy nightclub act, and Glenn Close, as an American historian who speaks what sounds like fluent-enough Spanish. A Grindr joke immediately punctuates a scene of military drama; in a movie about a national nightmare crushing the minds and bodies of young lovers and dreamers and artists, the cult comedian Julio Torres plays a supporting role. 

That beguiling mix of contemporary pop sensibility and classical filmmaking has an intoxicating potency, carrying us away on a sweeping, heartsick, often funny journey of recollection and fantasy. It is high time we had a gay war epic of this scope and soulfulness and invention. And it was certainly just in the nick of time that this often dour, dreary, disappointing Cannes competition finally gave us something so vivid and transporting, a reminder that maximalism need not solely be the prerogative of Hollywood blockbusters. Los Javis have proudly planted a flag in that sand and declared it their land, too.