La Bola Negra

There is, or perhaps more specifically would have been going to have been, a play of this name. "The black ball," after the club tradition, the existing membership given the ability to vote upon a candidate. It has a variety of antecedents, the process, up to and including the version based upon pottery that gives us the word 'ostracise'. The eponymous play survives as an unfinished manuscript, its -wright Federico García Lorca one of many killed in and around the Spanish Civil War. There is another work, La Piedra Oscura, "the dark stone", which is also alloyed into the whole. From these foundations comes something soaring, poetic, beautiful.

Across three periods, 1932, -37, and 2017, three men navigate what will become an ever more labyrinthine tale. Monsters and kings and clues abound, from the arrival of the Italians to the recursively wounded body of Sebastian. The saint, a martyr, a queer icon, is a scaffold upon whom another namesake climbs.

That Sebastian is musical artist Guitarricadelafuente, who with Carlos Gonzalez' Alberto and Milo Quifes' Carlos are the triagonists of a work whose quality matches its ambition. Their performances are phenomenal, in a cast that includes Glenn Close and Penelope Cruz they are still standouts. The film saves me the clumsiness of mentioning Pedro Almadovar by referencing him itself, though how this is done in the interwoven tales of masks and secrets and truths and revelations is one of multitudinous delights. I'll mention too Miguel Bernardeau and Lola Duenas, but would continue were it not that I would be merely listing names when I could exhort instead that you see it.

I do not mean to make any name 'mere', the performances across the board are measured and meaningful, capturing depths and delights. Co-directed by Javiers Calvo and Ambrossi, who co-write with La Piedra Oscura's playwright Alberto Conejero, they have taken a cast to die for and (to mix casino adjacent phrases) come up trumps. Gris Jordana's camera, her 35mm film, holds fast something painterly, almost supernatural in its compositions and beauty. There is a subtle distinction between a look and gaze and in actors and their faces we find both. Raul Refree's score supports it further, another of countless parts that La Bola Negra assembles above its central triptych to craft something almost akin to a cathedral in its majesty. At more than two and a half hours and across the span of some eighty years it is a work with a weight that is imposing.

I adored it. Having seen it in close proximity to Street Fighter it was a reminder that sometimes adapting a work to film can be about more than the empty search for corporate synergy, that in the translation there is transfiguration. La Bola Negra was an unfinished work in a life cut short but the film named (variously) for it is extension and tribute and triumph. The threads drawn from La Piedra Oscura and elsewhere are wound through and around to create something truly special.

Lorca's death has been attributed to both his politics and his sexuality. The protagonist of his unfinished play, like Lorca, Sebastian, Alberto, Carlos, also gay. The complexities of accepting that identity, individually, societally, run through La Bola Negra like veins in marble. It is reductive and perhaps even tawdry to suggest that this is a film in the intersection between Guernica and Grindr but the balance of art and commerce and destruction and desire is easily found on the other side of those screens. There will be some for whom its subject, its language, its setting, its length are all disqualifying, but that prejudice will cost them, leave them wanting. With significant awards interest already I can but plead that you find one with this shown upon it.