La Bola Negra Review: Los Javis's Queer Epic Tries Too Much, Lands Too Little

Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, the directing duo known as Los Javis, have packed an entire trilogy's worth of material into La Bola Negra, a sprawling literary-historical epic of gay male desire that cuts between the repressed 1930s and the liberated present. The verdict from our review desk: it's a film of big, often clumsy gestures that falls short of its maximalist ambitions.

The movie follows three gay men across three time frames. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Italian planes bomb a small village. A young trumpet player named Sebastián, played by the musician Guitarricadelafuente, survives and joins the right-wing Nationalist army. He's ordered to watch over a wounded prisoner, the exceedingly handsome freedom fighter Rafael, played by Miguel Bernardeau — and feels unmistakable stirrings of desire.

The second story unfolds in Granada in 1932. Milo Quifes plays Carlos, a young man from a rich family who's blackballed by an exclusive casino over suspicions of his homosexuality. The third strand runs in 2017: Carlos González plays Alberto, a Madrid-based historian with the casual sexual freedom his 1930s counterparts could never dream of. When his estranged maternal grandfather dies and leaves him a mysterious inheritance, Alberto begins researching the life and death of Federico García Lorca.

What does the title mean?

"La Bola Negra" is Spanish for "The Black Ball" — the ritual of exclusion Carlos suffers — and it's also the title of an unfinished play by Lorca, a detail that snaps into focus late in the film. Lorca was murdered by Nationalist forces in 1936, and some believe he was targeted for his homosexuality. His artistic and political legacy becomes the tissue connecting all three stories, a structure that owes an acknowledged debt to The Hours, which won Nicole Kidman an Oscar as Virginia Woolf.

Who stands out?

The star cameos deliver the film's brightest moments:

• Penélope Cruz steals her every scene as a cabaret singer who dazzles the troops and offers Sebastián crucial guidance.
• Glenn Close appears as an earnest Lorca scholar, though the role is drearily written.
• Lola Dueñas strikes one of the film's few genuine emotional chords as Alberto's mother, who resents his questions about the grandfather he never knew.

González makes Alberto a poignantly understated presence, but the rest of the cast comes off anemic by comparison. The 1937 storyline is the film's most substantial, yet Guitarricadelafuente, despite a strikingly offbeat screen presence, isn't yet a skilled enough actor to hold the narrative center.

Where does it go wrong?

Ambrossi and Calvo, who co-wrote the script with the playwright Alberto Conejero, cut relentlessly among the three stories. The incessant time-hopping means they're almost always looking away from their characters just as things get interesting. The showy crosscutting hammers home an already obvious point: that past and present are deeply connected.

The final half-hour attempts a bold leap into poetic abstraction, but it amounts to just another narrative thread — call it Story #3B. Aiming to be a queer-cinema monument for the ages, La Bola Negra instead becomes, in our critic's words, "monumentally tedious." Its passionate embrace by audiences is easy to understand; its execution, less easy to defend.