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the critiques of la bola negra that call it too “self-important” confuse me quite a bit because in my opinion, this felt like the first film i’ve seen that treats the queer experience - queer desire, queer repression, and everything in between - as “epic,” a genre typically reserved for the Straight White Male protagonist (see: the odyssey, which i also love!) and finally positions these experiences as equally Important in culture and society. this genre imbues them with the high stakes, life-and-death feeling so many of us wrestle with inside for years but shield from the surface, and in that way, i found it to be a revolutionary depiction of these stories for showing them in a new light onscreen they’ve always been denied.
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Calling it a film about “what it means to be a man who desires other men in times of war and peace” is such a diabolically reductive reading of a film that is fundamentally concerned with political violence, historical memory, and the generational consequences of repression.
“La Bola Negra,” a new film by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, dramatizes gay repression and liberation across three interconnected stories. At first, the year is 1937 and viewers are thrust deep into the Spanish Civil War, where a Nationalist soldier and a wounded Republican freedom fighter exchange furtive glances. By the end, it’s 2017, and a Madrid-based historian need only look to Grindr to satisfy an urge. The movie “wants to be a sweeping historical epic of gay longing—a film about what it means to be a man who desires other men in times of war and peace,” Justin Chang writes. Instead, the directors have produced “a film that insists, arrogantly and aggressively, on its own monumentality”. Even compelling performances from Glenn Close, Penélope Cruz, and Lola Dueñas fail to rescue the extravagantly overwrought film. Read Chang's full review: newyorker.com/culture/the-cu…
