Here is a film bursting with so many ideas that it’s a wonder the story—split between three timelines in two decades, about 80 years apart—doesn’t buckle under the weight of it all. To be completely honest, the fullness of the story does get the better of its co-writers/co-directors, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (collectively better known in their native Spain as “Los Javis”), as the narrative meanders between these various storylines for a portion of the middle act. That’s not nothing, though it registers quite faintly in the context of the whole of La Bola Negra—especially a last hour in which everything comes together with gutting emotionality.
The most important timelines are the two that end up paired together by virtue of a familial tie that becomes more and more complicated as the story moves ahead. Chronologically speaking, they are the second and third of those timelines, while the first is apparently separate from the others but, over the course of that last hour, eventually quite significant in its meaning and impact. The directors, adapting a pair of plays (one which is unfinished and, because it serves an important purpose in this narrative, will be otherwise unspecified and the other, titled La Piedra Oscura, written by Alberto Conejero, this film’s co-screenwriter), are tackling both the violent sectarian history of the country of Spain and a much more personal and intimate romance of a sort that was necessarily concealed by its participants.
If it sounds like a lot, it is, and Calvo and Ambrossi have approached this story as a grand and stirring period melodrama of a type that could easily have fit into the filmmaking of the 1960s across Europe—except, of course, for the third timeline, which takes place in 2017 and concerns the use of modern technology as a method of communication and connection. Here is where Alberto (Carlos González), summoned home to investigate his previously unknown family’s past, begins to realize some hard truths about his heritage and origins. He never knew his maternal grandfather, and as he attempts to reconcile with his flighty and distant mother Teresa (the great Lola Dueñas), he begins to get a sense of why.
The answers reside in a very different Spain, of 1937, during which a civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has, on a more personal level, left Sebastián, a humble musician played by Guitarricadelafuente (a musician himself, making an auspicious acting debut), without a mother or a home or a clear path forward. Indeed, it’s an act of horribly avoidable devastation that begins Sebastián’s story, as an aircraft belonging to Italy’s Legionary Air Force drops bombs on his village by accident. Stumbling into a nearby wood, he’s picked up, recruited on the spot for the Francoists, and tasked with interrogations.
His misfortune crosses paths with another young man—a Republican prisoner of war named Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), whom Sebastián immediately finds attractive and alluring, though for reasons he cannot initially accept or even define. The connection is initially a series of cautious and halting conversations between two men whose public interaction must, by virtue of their positions, be adversarial. It is, to be fair, since Sebastián is armed with a rifle and Rafael is limited to the movement of his hospital bed, having been gravely wounded in the stomach during a patch of combat.
Eventually, and predictably, those conversations turn to longing, which leads to a slightly languorous will-they-won’t-they tension that is, thankfully, complicated by the geopolitics of the region and the urgency of their situation. Any day now, as both men know, there may be some order sent down that results in the deaths of either Rafael or a dozen other men just like him, and the weight of that does afford a sense of focus to the relationship than the actual depiction of it does. The actors here are quite good at communicating the longing, the strain of what one of these men has been tasked to do, and the internal certainty that it may all be fleeting.
In the other, earlier timeline, the year is 1932, and a young, well-to-do man (played by Milo Quifes) has been rejected a casino membership on the very day of a botched military coup. Where this thread goes is far less defined by story than what occurs in the other timelines, and it mostly exists to offer some context to Alberto’s journey in 2017, as the former playwright consults with an expert (played by Glenn Close) on a theatre company owner who might have had a connection with Rafael’s story. To say that it all comes together, though, would be an understatement, as that final hour reveals layer upon layer, stacks revelations atop others, and ultimately devastates in what it has to say about the legacies left in the wake of both revolution and the movements that inspired them.
The movie does give in to some excesses, such as an interlude starring Penélope Cruz as a singer hired to entertain Sebastián and his fellow soldiers, which is basically here to speak the theme of the film directly at the camera (It helps that Cruz is one of the best working actors and, also, perhaps one of the few who could take a role like this and not settle for a caricature). Some of the film’s idiosyncratic flourishes early on, in particular some edits that feel on-the-nose, are small quibbles in the grand scheme of things. The movie is also simply grandiloquent in its production, to the point that the quibbles matter less and less—and stop mattering during, again, that final hour.
What resonates here is a grand exploration of dissidence during a terrifying period of war in a region torn apart by violence. That, as well as those truths that do truly shock to the core, lingers throughout La Bola Negra.
Rating: ***½ (out of ****)
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