"La Bola Negra"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

La Bola Negra is something truly rare: a milestone film, a watershed moment for queer filmmaking, a grand and sweeping historical epic that places homosexuality at its center and makes no apology. It is an essential film for queer audiences. Whether it has crossover or mainstream appeal is irrelevant: it is a movie made by and for the LGBTQ+ community.

It's also a challenging piece of historical drama that is entirely comprehensible without knowing the specifics of the Spanish Civil War or the life of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, but that invites curiosity and then deepens exponentially because of that knowledge.

All that may sound daunting, and I went into La Bola Negra assuming it might be a movie that I could admire more than love, that would be important without being genuinely moving. I was wrong on all counts. It's a remarkable story that is accessible and legible without any advance preparation. It is a movie that no queer person and nobody who cares deeply about film will want to miss.

It's so beautifully crafted and so visually impressive that even though it will appear on Netflix in December, it's well worth the effort to see it in a movie theater during its initial run. Directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, who share screenwriting credit with Alberto Conejero, La Bola Negra is complex, intelligent and profoundly moving.

Anyone who thought Digger was too "meta" may go apoplectic when they try to make sense of La Bola Negra, in which Lorca himself is a character and also the inspiration for the film's story, which is in part based on an unfinished (only four pages long) play he was writing at the time of his murder by Spanish Nationalists. Lorca's partner, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún is a major character in one of three interwoven narratives that make up the film.

In one, Rapún is a Spanish Republic soldier taken prisoner during the Spanish Civil War and watched over by Nationalist soldier Sebastián, who has no strong loyalty to the Spanish government. He became a solider after his village was destroyed by Italian forces, and finds himself strongly attracted to Rapún, who he does not know is gay. Their relationship deepens, but is threatened by the realities of war.

Even as Sebastián hides the secret of his sexual orientation, Rapún himself hides an even deeper secret — the play that Lorca was working on, and that Rapún has vowed to protect at all costs.

That play, La Bola Negra, or "the black ball," becomes a second storyline in the film, telling of a young man before the Civil War who must hide his own identity in order to gain admission to an elite society. His self-doubt grows when a man he may love, Enrique, tries to persuade him to renounce society and join the dissidents.

The third story takes place in the present, as a frustrated Madrid playwright named Alberto discovers he has come into an inheritance — one his embittered mother doesn't want him to accept. When he finds out what the inheritance is, the entire shape of this bold and ambitious film comes clear.

A huge cast, which includes Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close (largely speaking Spanish), is uniformly brilliant, especially Spanish musician Guitarricadelafuente and impossibly handsome Miguel Bernardeau as the ill-fated lovers caught in the war; and the seemingly more straightforward but ultimately intensely complex role of Alberto, the present day writer-researcher, that becomes quietly devastating in the hands of Carlos González.

La Bola Negra is about the legacy that persists on far beyond our human lifespan. It challenges the conventional wisdom that because we often don't have children or large families, and historically haven't lived openly, gay men are destined to leave less of a mark on the world. It recognizes and understands the fundamental pains of living life secretly, while also confronting broader generational trauma — not just of gay men but of everyone who lives through private and public wars — with dignity, grace and beauty.

Its story structure is massive in both scope and execution, but La Bola Negra reaches a simple and moving conclusion: We all matter. Every single one of us. No one's pain is less than any other, but some of that pain reaches through the decades to shape who we become. This is an astonishing, audacious film, certainly one of the very, very best in a remarkably strong year.