Directors: Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo
Stars: Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González, Penélope Cruz
Back at the beginning of 2026 savvy UK cinema-goers were treated to one of the year’s very finest offerings by Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose The Secret Agent bridged an ambitious temporal gap between the past and present to tell it’s story. The rediscovery of the past and the handing down of artefacts were intrinsic notions there, but the film also felt emblematic of a transition in cinema, presenting a historically set story in the genre traditions of the chosen time period (in that case, the urgent political thrillers of the ’70s) but seen through a more detached modernist lens in which the present is colder, more academic and less inclined to romanticism.
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (collectively Los Jovis) echo many of those sentiments in the construction of their sprawling La Bola Negra, which jostles three timelines and goes the long way round to make an urgent call for greater queer acceptance in their native Spain. Three stories of gay men are recounted in varying detail, with all three inspired or moved by the writings of the poet Federico García Lorca, whose unfinished play gives the film it’s title. In 1932 we have Carlos (Milo Quifes), a young aristocrat in Granada whose hopes of joining a syndicate of casino stakeholders are marred by prejudice surrounding his rumoured lifestyle. In 1937 we follow Sebastían (Guitarricadelafuente), a bugalist from a small Northern town who gets conscripted into the nationalist army and meets convalescing prisoner of war Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau) while struggling to grasp the politics he’s become entrenched in. And then there’s a jump, to 2017, and floundering young playrite Alberto (Carlos González), whose life is upended by news of an unexpected and mysterious inheritance.
We suspect early on that the 2017 storyline will connect generationally to one of the other two, and this confirmation comes pretty willingly, but it’s a good 90 minutes or so before Los Jovis turn the card that links all three. This with another full hour still to come. La Bola Negra‘s ambition is met by an obviously blessed budget, which affords the Javiers the opportunity to present their sinuous epic with swooning production values redolent of Europe’s long legacy of prestige pictures. It’s all incredibly handsome, some might say privileged – ironically, given the themes – filmmaking. The very sweep and grandeur becomes a bit of a millstone and a risk. Fitting so comfortably and recognisably into an expected groove for a big budget period film, so La Bola Negra sort of coasts. The grimness of war is dutifully represented as broken bodies are pulled from the flatbeds of pick-up trucks. As the Nazi collaborators mercilessly execute prisoners. As Sebastían’s home town is decimated by Italian artillery. And Los Jovis reach boldly (and often in slow motion) for tableaux that share the iconic power of a Tarkovsky image. But thanks to the narrative coyness, it’s also plodding, cagy, hard to feel attached to.
There’s also a conspicuous inequality between the tales, with Carlos’ 1932 endeavour to join the casino given the least attention or context. In time a reason for that will become clear, but for at least half of the movie it feels frustratingly undernourished. All three episodes reckon with Spain’s conservative strictures on queer life. In 2017, Alberto’s relative freedoms act as a relief for the demanded secrecy felt by Sebastían and Carlos, but his openness gives rise to other challenges, particularly when it comes to the acceptance of his mother (Lola Dueñas). It gives rise to the rumination, are all queer histories secret histories? A thought vocally challenged in the film by Rafael at his story’s darkly melodramatic crescendo; “No one disappears completely” he says. It’s a rousing romantic notion, but the film does it’s best to evidence that, to find some stories, considerable excavation is required.
La Bola Negra is just that, an act of excavation. A reckoning with Spain’s past failings, and in that respect it finds itself in lockstep with one of the recent masterworks of the country’s dearest cinematic representative; Pedro Almodóvar and his brilliant civil war requiem Parallel Mothers (Almodóvar, who of course produces, also manages to get a delightful and unexpected namecheck).
If there’s a dalliance with doldrums in the first half of the picture we are roused out of these by the film’s other surprise guest star and national treasure. Penélope Cruz enlivens the Sebastían narrative as sex-working cabaret artiste Nené Romero, entertaining the fascist troops like a shrewd lifelong mercenary. Dressing in uniform, her routines cause such outbursts of testosterone that the bawdy night threatens to turn fallow, kindling memories of the USO show sequence from Apocalypse Now. Able to seemingly detect Sebastían’s queerness by merely glancing at him, she allows him a more intimate audience where the film vocalises a central thesis, that war goes against fantasy, goes against possibility, and that queerness (particularly transvestism in this example) is a necessary adversary to war’s ravenous appetite for destruction.
It’s all very rousing, and Los Jovis soar for the stratosphere in the film’s late stages, once the disparate narrative threads have been woven together and the stirring inevitability of the third act comes into focus. If the 1932 thread tapers flimsily and the 1937 feels a shade reduced to tragic melodrama, then Alberto’s more contemporary journey shows the most depth of character and understanding. Being so close to our present milieu, perhaps this was always inevitable. It makes La Bola Negra feel strangely like a requiem for the war weepies of old. The messaging here feels clear and urgent. Righteous and insistent. Jane Schoenbrun couched the queer pain of I Saw the TV Glow with the reassurance that “there is still time”. Los Jovis almost directly counter this with a more severe warning that “There is only now”. Given the escalating fascism it arrives into, I have no objection to full-throated anger and resistance. La Bola Negra criticises past complicity. Like a lot of prestige pictures, it rejects subtlety for a cumulative bombast that’s easy to get swept up in. I just wish, personally, that the journey itself were more consistent.
