'Gay Titanic': La Bola Negra rides Cannes glory toward the Oscars

Cannes handed its best director prize jointly to Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo this year, and their film La Bola Negra is now an Oscars frontrunner. Best picture and best director nominations are, by most accounts, all but guaranteed. Not bad for a queer war epic from Spain.

Ambrossi and Calvo are known in their native country as "Los Javis." Their film stars Penélope Cruz in a blond wig and Glenn Close speaking Spanish. It bagged awards before it even reached the awards season proper. It also, according to its directors, captures what they call "the anti-fascist zeitgeist."

How big is 'the biggest, gayest war movie ever'?

Scale came first for the duo, before style, awards or politics. "I'm done with LGBTQ+ movies being niche," Ambrossi said. "I was like, 'Let's make the biggest, gayest war movie ever.'" Job done, by their own measure.

The comparison people keep reaching for is the one in the headline: it's the gay Titanic, a maximalist spectacular that oozes panache rather than apology. The film darts back and forth between three stories set in Spain:

• 1932: a young man applies for membership of an exclusive casino and is rejected on the grounds of his suspected homosexuality.
• 1937: a callow nationalist soldier develops tender feelings for the injured republican prisoner under his watch.
• 2017: a queer historian inherits an unfinished story by Federico García Lorca.

That Lorca story lends the movie its title and provides the thread that sews the three strands together.

Who else shared the Cannes prize?

The best director award at Cannes went jointly to Los Javis and to Paweł Pawlikowski, whose Thomas Mann road trip film Fatherland also premiered at the festival. A shared prize is a rare outcome at Cannes. Sharing it with a Polish auteur of Pawlikowski's standing says something about the range the jury wanted to honor.

What does the Oscars frontrunner status mean?

The film's momentum rests on a simple calculation. A Cannes directing prize, maximalist spectacle, named stars and a political register that matches the moment — that combination tends to travel through an awards season intact. The directors weren't thinking about any of this when they wrote it, they say. They were thinking only of scale.

Whether "the biggest, gayest war movie ever" converts its frontrunner status into statuettes will be settled in the new year. The nominations, at least, look like a formality.