Skipped our usual Saturday dinner because I was offered a preview screening of Los Javis’ LA BOLA NEGRA and couldn’t wait to see it. It lived up to the hype – best director at Cannes, People’s Choice at TIFF, setting box office records with over 600,000 tickets sold in its first three days in Spain alone, etc– and at the end of the film much of the audience was in tears, lingering in the theatre past the credits, not wanting to leave.
It’s quite extraordinary for a queer movie about Fedérico García Lorca’s last/lost play, historical memory, creating utopias out of disaster, dressing darkness with poetry, bringing into light what was hidden, and dramatizing the effects of all those silences on subsequent generations. The film is set in three different periods, 1932 during the second Republic, 1937, in the midst of the Civil War, and 2017, the film’s present, which is already ten years ago. The film cuts seamlessly from one time to the other as intent on their intermingling as on their demarcations, though the audience is never at a loss to understand what is when.
The film is gorgeous to look at with a real eye for finding texture and depth in the visuals but also as is to be expected from the writers of PAQUITA SALAS, great lines. And indeed much of what the film explores can be relayed through snippets of dialogue: ‘You’ll never understand how much I love you because you sleep within me and are asleep (this one from Lorca); ‘I feel none of the hours have ever belonged to me because I haven’t lived them’; ‘We were very happy, we all lived in mortal sin. Let’s hope we can sin again, soon, in Madrid’; ‘Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite’; ‘A faggot’s heart is an ocean full of secrets’; ‘What do we lose when we deny our very selves? Life!’; ‘I think I can help people so they don’t end up as you and I’; ‘Who will defend me from your beauty?’; You’ve inherited something you don’t know what to do with. You’re Spanish’; Spain has too many love stories buried in the camps. We have to scratch the earth so they may come out.
I am of course particularly vulnerable to this material. The young people in the war could be my grandparents, though the young man who gets sent on the quest for his grandfather’s legacy would be at least a generation younger than I. It’s a film that, as the audience response in Spain testifies, has all kinds of resonances. But it clearly also travels well. Miguel Bernardeau (ELITE, the new ZORRO) is the beauty Lorca falls for, pop-sensation Guitarrica de la Fuente is the peasant who falls in love with his captive, Carlos González is the grandson on the search. Penelope Cruz has a marvellous star turn as a cabaret entertainer; and Glenn Close appears as a Lorca scholar. Gris Jordana is the cinematographer. The score of the film is superb and worthy of the film’s visuals. A film to see.
José Arroyo
