The film "La Bola Negra" traces how unrecorded love and concealed identity leave marks that reach beyond a single life and across generations. Winner of the audience award at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, the work confronts questions Spanish cinema has long carried.
Directed by Los Javis (Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi), the film interweaves the stories of three men set in 1932, 1937 and 2017. They are Carlos (Milo Taboada), rejected when he tries to join his father's social club during Spain's Second Republic; Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente), who comes to recognize his own identity while guarding prisoners during the civil war; and Alberto (Carlos González), who confronts a legacy of silence after his maternal grandfather's death. The lives of these men, living in different eras, become entangled within the historical currents of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. What links the three is an unfinished work left behind by Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright.
The original title translates literally as "the black ball," but it has been kept in Spanish to preserve the poetic resonance of the work. The phrase comes from the secret ballot once used by Western clubs and organizations to decide on new members. A white ball meant approval; a black ball meant rejection, that is, exclusion. In the film, the title goes beyond a historical custom to symbolize the violence that casts an individual out of a group, forces identity into hiding and buries unrecorded love and lives in silence. Yet a past interred in silence does not disappear; it returns to the present in another form. At the center of that past stands Sebastián, and Guitarricadelafuente, who plays him, is the heart of the film. The two directors wrote the character with him in mind from the conception stage. The questions he had carried while working on his album "Spanish Leather" — desire, identity and a longing for something not yet named — met naturally with the figure of Sebastián.
Sebastián, a sad-eyed trumpet player from a village, is like a boy holding an immense inner world. He does not fully grasp the political situation surrounding him, but as a soldier in the Nationalist army he gradually begins to recognize his own desire after meeting Rafael, the Republican prisoner he is assigned to guard. In an era that offers him neither the language to express desire nor the freedom to live it, he stands at the boundary between recognition and impossibility.
Rafael, played by Miguel Bernardeau, is the figure who leads Sebastián to the point of being able to name his own desire. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, he awakens Sebastián's feelings for the first time. Amid the extremes brought by war, their relationship is always precarious. In urgent hours when separation or death could come at any moment, only glances, silences and small gestures connect them.
Sebastián and Rafael, Carlos in 1932 and Alberto in 2017 live in different eras yet pose the same questions. Who am I? What am I allowed to desire? What happens if I reveal who I really am? Alberto enjoys a freedom earlier generations could not have imagined, but he still carries the weight of their silence and their pain.
All of these questions are distilled into "La nieve," the song by Guitarricadelafuente that resounds at the film's climax. Its simple melody and restrained delivery mean the song imposes no particular emotion on the audience, instead opening a space where each viewer can sit quietly beside the feeling left behind. The distinct timbres that Raül Refree's score assigns to each character — brass for Sebastián, piano and chorus for Carlos, silence for Alberto — slowly merge into a single resonance, in perfect harmony with the open space "La nieve" leaves behind. Through this film, Guitarricadelafuente hopes Lorca will reach audiences not as a distant figure confined to textbooks but as a living, breathing presence.
Released on Netflix on Dec. 2, the much-discussed "La Bola Negra" brings back stories that went unrecorded, voices that were silenced and the traces of forgotten lives. It also commemorates the rare moments in history when homosexuality could be spoken in the language of art, and makes Lorca felt as "a father who left the door open for all of us." The film throws that once-closed door wide open again.
/Ha Eun-sun, member of the Golden Globe Foundation (GGF)