{"id":27597,"date":"2026-05-21T19:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/27597\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T19:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:56:10","slug":"the-black-ball-cannes-review-an-overlong-tribute-to-gay-spain-that-drowns-in-its-own-solemnity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/27597\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Black Ball’ Cannes Review: An Overlong Tribute To Gay Spain That Drowns In Its Own Solemnity"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The filmmaking duo known as Los Javis \u2014 Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi \u2014 have earned a well-deserved place among the rare creators who manage to be both popular and genuinely original. Their work, from Paquita Salas to Veneno to La mes\u00edas, has always defied easy categorization: provocative, overwrought, bizarre, melodramatic, and gloriously kitsch, perpetually teetering on the edge of collapse yet held together by the warmth, tenderness, and deep humanity they pour into their most complicated characters.<\/p>\n

La bola negra begins with a problem. Los Javis take themselves far too seriously \u2014 with a gravity and solemnity that suggests no one has ever dared speak this particular truth before \u2014 and that humorlessness, that absence of mischief and play, weighs heavily on what is otherwise an interconnected anthology of stories whose threads slowly weave together over the course of the film. In its near-epic ambition, the Spanish film seems to want nothing less than to chronicle the secret history of homosexual life in Spain across an entire century. That pretension ultimately crushes a set of ideas, characters, and situations that might have breathed more freely without quite so many drumrolls accompanying them through their very long journey.<\/p>\n

The film unfolds across three parallel narrative timelines. The earliest, chronologically, gives the film its title \u2014 those familiar with the life of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca will recognize the connection to one of his unfinished novels (no spoilers here). Set in 1932, it follows a young gay man seeking work at a local casino and being turned away, as everyone assumes, because of his sexuality. The second and most central storyline takes place five years later, in 1937, tracing the love that develops between two soldiers fighting on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War. The third unfolds in 2017, when a young writer discovers, through an inheritance, that he is connected to both of the earlier stories.<\/p>\n

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The middle chapter is the most fully realized. Based on Alberto Conejero\u2019s play La piedra oscura, it centers on Sebasti\u00e1n (Guitarricadelafuente), a young trumpet player who flees his village after an Italian bombing raid and ends up as a Nationalist soldier, and Rafael Rodr\u00edguez Rap\u00fan \u2014 look him up if you\u2019d like, though any information risks spoiling something \u2014 a wounded Republican soldier taken prisoner during the Battle of Santander, whom Sebasti\u00e1n is tasked with guarding and nursing back to health. What begins in mutual suspicion gradually becomes something more intimate and tender.<\/p>\n

Carlos Gonz\u00e1lez plays Alberto in the 2017 storyline, a young gay man who abandoned his theatrical career and maintains a fraught relationship with his chaotic mother, played by Lola Due\u00f1as. A summons to collect his late grandfather\u2019s inheritance in Santander makes him, in a sense, the heir and witness to this lineage of gay men who were never able to live out their loves, their desires, or their stories. The film\u2019s most affecting scene is also its simplest: a conversation in a bar between Alberto and a man who lived through those earlier events. It lands far more powerfully than the film\u2019s relentless visual metaphors, which Los Javis lob at the audience with exhausting regularity. The same is true of Pen\u00e9lope Cruz\u2019s appearance as a music hall performer \u2014 her presence briefly lifts the melodramatic solemnity that settles over the film like a fog and never quite disperses.<\/p>\n

Structured in distinct episodes, with narrative timelines that \u2014 with modest restructuring \u2014 could easily have functioned as another miniseries, The Black Ball never trusts the audience to make its own connections. Whatever is shown is then explained, and whatever is explained is then converted into symbol or metaphor. And everything is repeated three, four, ten times over. Soldiers wandering naked along a beach carries a genuine homoerotic charge the first time, perhaps the second \u2014 here it recurs to the point of tedium. The same goes for the relationship between Sebasti\u00e1n and Rafael: every theme is underlined and underlined again, with the actors frequently made to state aloud what the film is already showing, as though the audience cannot be trusted to understand what it sees.<\/p>\n

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That the film is formally and narratively excessive will surprise no one who knows Los Javis\u2019 work \u2014 excess is part of their DNA, and they\u2019ve wielded it beautifully before. What flattens the ambition here is an unrelenting seriousness, a near-total absence of lightness \u2014 except, briefly, in the appearances of Cruz and Glenn Close, whose small role works rather well \u2014 some late-arriving poetic-surrealist flourishes, a pomposity that works against the characters\u2019 more genuine emotions, and a weakness for grandiose metaphor that recalls the cinema of Eliseo Subiela at his most\u2026 problematic.<\/p>\n

When Los Javis ease off the accelerator and linger on a detail \u2014 a song, a party, a conversation, a silence \u2014 the film comes alive. But those moments are few. Whatever the value of their tribute to the LGBT+ people who were forced to live their emotional lives in silence throughout the twentieth century, La bola negra reveals the limits of their cinematic imagination: an XXL regurgitation of every poetic gesture gay cinema has managed over its history. There is very little Fassbinder here, even less Pasolini. At its best, there are good intentions and a generous dose of sentimental literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The filmmaking duo known as Los Javis \u2014 Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi \u2014 have earned a well-deserved…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12142,292,7056,7057,14178,14179,17,14180],"class_list":["post-27597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-cannes-2026","tag-competition","tag-javier-ambrossi","tag-javier-calvo","tag-la-bola-negra","tag-los-javis","tag-spain","tag-the-black-ball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}