La Bola Negra review: 'a barrage of flashy technique and bloated plotting'
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This Spanish epic may have been tipped for glory at the Oscars but it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about, writes Alistair Harkness
La Bola Negra (15) ★★
Film festival grade inflation and early onset awards-season insanity have already conspired to turn Spanish epic La Bola Negra into a pre-ordained Oscar frontrunner. Beyond a boisterous cameo from Penélope Cruz and the supposed novelty of its queer perspective on the Spanish Civil War, though, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about.
Which isn’t to say it’s not ambitious. Filmmakers Javier Ambrosia and Javier Calvo (collectively known as Los Javis) attempt some audacious narrative tricks by weaving together three stories across three different timelines, all abstractly linked by the gay poet, writer and theatre director Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by Nationalist forces as the Civil War broke out in 1936. Yet the mystery at its core is rendered only intermittently interesting, in large part because of this cross-cutting structure (it jumps between 1932, 1937 and 2017), but also because of how stultifying Los Javis’s recreation of queer life in 1930s Spain is.
Admittedly there’s a deliberate theatricality to the earliest-set strand, which revolves around the son of a well-to-do family blackballed by an exclusive casino over persistent rumours regarding his sexuality. But as the bulk of the film takes shape around a furtive affair between a young soldier fighting for Franco’s fascists and the imprisoned left-wing freedom fighter he’s been charged with guarding (Spanish musician Guitarricadelafuente plays the former, Miguel Bernardeau the latter), it becomes a weirdly chaste story of impossible love, the sort that might hoodwink awards voters into thinking they’re watching something important, but feels mausoleum-like in its reverence for the melodramatic tragedy of it all. Indeed, it’s telling that it relies on that aforementioned Penélope Cruz cameo – she plays a cabaret diva brought into entertain the troops – to articulate its themes.
Such coyness is supposed to bring into sharp relief the more contemporary strand, which features its sexually liberated protagonist, Alberto (Carlos González), enjoying casual Grindr hook-ups as well as a steady same-sex relationship. It’s through Alberto, a queer historian investigating an unexpected inheritance from the maternal grandfather he never knew, that the connections between all three strands start falling into place (Glenn Close pops up too as an academic writing a book on Lorca). But by this point whatever the film is trying to say about the correlation between suppressed desire and totalitarianism has been lost in a barrage of flashy technique and bloated plotting.
La Bola Negra is in cinemas from 6 November
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