“This land has too many love stories buried in its fields,” says the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a brief dramatized appearance at the tail end of “The Black Ball” — a film otherwise content just to channel his spirit as it exhumes the suppressed inner lives of gay men across generations. The second feature by Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — a two-man queer entertainment empire in their home country — is nothing if not ambitious as it fuses both real and imagined Lorca lore to connect the lives of three men variously adrift, in the years 1932, 1937 and 2017 respectively. But if “The Black Ball” occasionally strikes a poetic note worthy of its historical muse, it more often plays as turgidly overblown melodrama, its themes writ large through schematically intersecting narrative strands.
Something of a wild card entry in this year’s Cannes competition — few would have guessed that’s where the Javiers were headed after their 2017 debut, the dippy musical comedy “Holy Camp!” — “The Black Ball” has a florid formal approach and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism that will win it fans at home and abroad, both in and outside of the LGBT arthouse market. But it’s also something of a slog: Nearly 160 minutes is rather a long time to spend around the filmmakers’ brashly symphonic style, in the company of characters who, as neatly as their paths collide over time, remain fairly two-dimensional throughout, played with serviceable sincerity but not much granular detail by an attractive ensemble.
The title is loaned from one of Lorca’s unfinished works (just four pages of a potential novel, though here described as a play), the very text of which becomes a critical plot point in the screenplay — written by the Javiers in collaboration with playwright Alberto Conejero, whose own play “La Piedra Oscuro” is also woven into this loose, fanciful feat of adaptation. In the Lorca piece, a young, closeted man from an upper-class Granada family attempts to join a high-end local casino, only to be rejected by the membership committee — voting with the old system of white balls for yes, black balls for no — because they suspect his homosexuality.
Set in 1932, the earliest of the film’s subplots begins as a straightforward dramatization of this premise — starring Milo Quifes as Carlos, the unfortunate young man in question — before splintering into increasingly surreal speculation as to how the story might have ended, had Lorca not been shot dead, shortly after he began writing it, in the Spanish Civil War. (Lorca’s recurrent use of snow as a metaphor for death figures heavily here.) The spine of the film, however, is its 1937-set section, centered on another young, tensely gay man: rural Republican trumpeter Sebastián (popular Spanish musician Guitarricadelafuente, in his screen debut), who, following the bombing of his home village in the war, survives by joining the Nationalist army.
Stationed at a military hospital, he forms a fragile bond with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau, from the hit Netflix drama “Elite”), the real-life soccer player and Spanish soldier who also happened to be Lorca’s lover. As fictionalized here, he essentially functions as the gatekeeper of Lorca’s legacy; as the men grow closer, Rafael’s bravery in living out his sexual and political identity places Sebastián’s self-protecting subterfuge even more starkly in relief. In 2017, meanwhile, neurotic historian Alberto (Carlos González) is able to live openly as a gay man with his boyfriend Juan Pablo (comedian and filmmaker Julio Torres), but has other problems to contend with — including his estrangement from his negligent mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas), and a death in the family that reveals a queer lineage he never knew about.
“The Black Ball” is earnest in its efforts to find and forge connective tissue between generations of gay Spanish men whose stories, whether due to systemic prejudice, denial or the drift of time and memory, haven’t always been inherited by their successors. But it can be clunky and even maudlin on this front: A cameo from Glenn Close as an American Lorca scholar who sees her work as “avenging” the teenage suicide of her gay brother is such a heavy-handed celebration of allyship as to feel almost PSA-like. (Penélope Cruz, as a feather boa-wrapped wartime showgirl, gets to support the boys in rather more amusing fashion.) And as it chases a cathartic sense of joint closure to these braided timelines, the film’s channeling of Lorca’s language and imagery sometimes blows past lyricism into kitsch. “Dark words I never set fire to are burning now,” a background troubadour trills, as Carlos’ reality turns into a frozen afterlife.
There is, however, enough confidently muscular filmmaking here to prompt our interest in just where the Javiers will go from here. In particular, a bravura opening sequence that tracks Sebastián’s displacement from his home and subsequent survival strategy plays out as a somersaulting succession of catastrophes with occasional, rueful jabs of comedy, steering our hero through rattling military fire, wasteland-style rubble and finally into water — kept immersive by DP Gris Jordana’s athletic lensing (switching to black-and-white when the historical perspective calls for it), Alberto Gutiérrez’s equally flashy editing, and Raül Refree’s barreling, barnstorming score. “The Black Ball” does not come or go quietly, which is largely its point: If the film wants for subtlety and serenity, there is also something quite poignant about its narrative and stylistic maximalism, honoring any number of queer ancestors who never got to live out loud.
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