‘La Bola Negra’ Boldly Reimagines a Spanish Love Story, Giving Lorca the Ending He Was Denied

“Of all the human beings I have ever known,” Luis Buñuel wrote of his friend Federico García Lorca, “Federico was the finest….He was his own masterpiece.” In August 1936, a month into the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist gunmen took that masterpiece to a hillside outside Granada and shot him. He was 38. His body has never been found. 90 years on, two of Spain’s most popular filmmakers have gone looking for him, not in the archives or the mass graves, but in the few pages of a play he never finished.The result, “La Bola Negra”, is the best film I have seen this year. It is a sprawling wartime epic that braids together three love stories across almost a century. When those three timelines finally lock together, the effect is less a plot twist than a blow to the chest. I have felt that only a few times in a cinema. I left shaken, grieving for a man killed decades before I was born, and grateful to the film for making me feel it.The three narrative threads are all bound by secrets. In Granada in 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes), the young son of a wealthy family, applies to join the casino, the gentlemen’s club where his father and grandfather are members. Its elders vote by secret ballot, a white ball to admit and a black one to exclude, and, sneering at homosexuals like him as “men of saliva”, they blackball him. Five years later, amid the Civil War, Sebastián (the singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, in his screen debut) is a musician press-ganged into Franco’s army. He is assigned to guard a wounded Republican prisoner, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), the real-life secretary of Lorca’s touring theater company and the poet’s last great love. In Madrid in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a young historian, receives an unexpected inheritance from his estranged grandfather, which reopens old wounds with his formidable mother (Lola Dueñas).What unites the three men is one of Lorca’s last, unfinished plays, “La bola negra”, of which only four pages survive. The fragment is tantalizingly thin. Lorca began the play, subtitled “a drama of present-day manners”, early in 1936. Of the four handwritten sheets, two are a cast list. The other two hold the start of a conversation between Carlos, a young man of 20, and his sister, and the play breaks off halfway down the page. Nothing in them says Carlos is gay.The evidence that he was lies elsewhere, some of it in Lorca’s own hand. On a list of planned plays, Lorca crossed out “La bola negra” and wrote a new title, “La piedra oscura” (“The Dark Stone”). Beside it he wrote ‘drama epéntico’, his circle’s invented code word for gay. In 1934 he had told an interviewer that he wanted to bring to the stage “problems that people are afraid to address.” The only account of the play’s key scene, in which a son tells his father he has been blackballed “because I am homosexual”, comes from one friend, the director Cipriano Rivas Cherif, who wrote it down 21 years later in exile in Mexico.That fragility is the film’s real subject. Gay history lives on in scraps like these, in late recollections and code words, because the record was destroyed or never kept. I first went down this rabbit hole in 1998, the centenary of Lorca’s birth, when I produced a “Lorca Fiesta” in Newcastle; directed a version of “Poet in New York”; and co-wrote “Fire, Blood and the Alphabet”. Even then, the trail kept running into silence. “La Bola Negra” does what historians cannot by imagining what fills them. A subway poster for ‘La Bola Negra.’ Sebastian DoggartThe screenplay, by Los Javis and the playwright Alberto Conejero, is a beautifully crafted triptych that weaves its three stories together. Its noble ancestors are D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916), told across four eras, from ancient Babylon to modern America, and Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” (2002), in which three women in three eras are joined by a single novel, “Mrs. Dalloway”. Here, Lorca stands in for Virginia Woolf.The deeper kinship, though, is with Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 film “Incendies”. In both films, a family’s will sends the next generation into a buried past, and the audience does the detective work alongside them. When the pieces fall into place, the recognition the Greek tragedians called anagnorisis happens not only to the characters but to us. That is why the emotion feels physical rather than sentimental. We have earned it.The directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi are known in Spain simply as Los Javis. Their first film, “La Llamada” (2017), was a giddy musical comedy about teenage girls at a Catholic summer camp, adapted from their own stage hit. Nothing in their earlier work prepares you for the scale of this film, which won them the joint Best Director prize at Cannes.Pedro Almodóvar’s company, El Deseo, is a co-producer, and you can feel his appetite for the emotional power of well-made melodrama. The Civil War scenes, shot with bravura by Gris Jordana, have a muddy, chaotic urgency that recalls “1917”. Music is everywhere, as it was for Lorca, an accomplished pianist, guitarist and songwriter.Guitarricadelafuente gives Sebastián a watchful, haunted presence that anchors the film. Miguel Bernardeau, best known as Guzmán in Netflix’s “Élite”, is a magnetic Rafael, and the film’s camera adores him. Milo Quifes, another newcomer, catches the stifled panic of Carlos — a thinly veiled stand-in for Lorca — a sensitive, well-to-do son of Granada, born into a society that would not let him be what he was. Carlos González makes Alberto, a man more at ease exploring other people’s histories than his own, quietly sympathetic. Lola Dueñas, a regular in Mr. Almodóvar’s films, is superb as Alberto’s caustic, heavy-drinking mother.Penélope Cruz’s appearance as Nené Romero, a cabaret singer performing for soldiers, is the film’s showstopper, with something of Dietrich in it. Lorca had a word for what happens when a performance stops being technique and something rawer breaks through: duende, a dark force that “rises from the soles of the feet” and appears only when death is close. In Cruz’s number — and in the film’s stunning climax — duende arrives.Penélope Cruz in ‘La Bola Negra.’ Via Carla Oset/NetflixNot everything works. Glenn Close, cast as a Lorca scholar, is never convincing in Spanish or as the field’s leading authority. Another misstep is putting Lorca himself on screen, in scenes shot in black and white. The monochrome sets him apart like an archival ghost, but Lorca is already present in every frame, and seeing him in the flesh shrinks him rather than summoning him. Running over two-and-a-half hours, and in Spanish with subtitles, the film asks a lot of its audience and yet I would not cut a minute.The film is most powerful in portraying the loneliness of being gay in a homophobic society and the losses people suffer when they deny who they are. Set against that is something rare. The extraordinary privilege of finding the person you want to spend your life with, even briefly, even in a war. In one scene, a lover tastes blood from his beloved’s wound, one of the most visceral images of desire I have seen on screen.Every great artist who dies young leaves a shadow library of the works that never came, and Lorca’s, cut off just two months after he finished “The House of Bernarda Alba”, is one of the cruelest in modern art. Behind this loss lies the crime the film wisely does not show. Lorca was arrested in Granada on August 16, 1936, and shot at dawn two or three days later on the road between Víznar and Alfacar, alongside a schoolteacher and two anarchist bullfighters. One of the men present later boasted of having shot him because he was homosexual. A year before the killing, Pablo Neruda had written Lorca a prescient ode that in my translation partly reads, “When to sing you shake arteries and teeth, throat and fingers, I could die for how sweet you are.” It has never read the same since.Lorca loved movies, writing that “the cinema has for me an indescribable magic, a freedom beyond compare. When we enter the darkness of the cinema, it is as if we close our eyes and begin a journey mapped by the imagination”. In New York in 1929, he wrote a screenplay, “Trip to the Moon”, a cascade of dreamlike images not filmed until 1998. He never got to finish his drama epéntico. Los Javis have finished it for him, on a scale he could only have imagined. I suspect he would have wept and then demanded a party.Neruda’s ode contains a question that could serve as this film’s epilogue: “Come, let me crown you, youth of health and butterflies, youth as pure as a black lightning flash, perpetually free; and between the two of us, now, when there is no one else among the rocks, let us speak simply, you as you, I as I: what is verse for if not for the dew?”

‘La Bola Negra’ Boldly Reimagines a Spanish Love Story, Giving Lorca the Ending He Was Denied

‘La Bola Negra’ Boldly Reimagines a Spanish Love Story, Giving Lorca the Ending He Was Denied

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