‘The Black Ball’ Cannes Review: An Overlong Tribute To Gay Spain That Drowns In Its Own Solemnity

The filmmaking duo known as Los Javis — Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — 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 mesías, 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.

La bola negra begins with a problem. Los Javis take themselves far too seriously — with a gravity and solemnity that suggests no one has ever dared speak this particular truth before — 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.

The film unfolds across three parallel narrative timelines. The earliest, chronologically, gives the film its title — those familiar with the life of Federico García 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.

The middle chapter is the most fully realized. Based on Alberto Conejero’s play La piedra oscura, it centers on Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente), a young trumpet player who flees his village after an Italian bombing raid and ends up as a Nationalist soldier, and Rafael Rodríguez Rapún — look him up if you’d like, though any information risks spoiling something — a wounded Republican soldier taken prisoner during the Battle of Santander, whom Sebastián is tasked with guarding and nursing back to health. What begins in mutual suspicion gradually becomes something more intimate and tender.

Carlos González 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 Dueñas. A summons to collect his late grandfather’s 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’s 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’s relentless visual metaphors, which Los Javis lob at the audience with exhausting regularity. The same is true of Penélope Cruz’s appearance as a music hall performer — her presence briefly lifts the melodramatic solemnity that settles over the film like a fog and never quite disperses.

Structured in distinct episodes, with narrative timelines that — with modest restructuring — 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 — here it recurs to the point of tedium. The same goes for the relationship between Sebastián 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.

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

When Los Javis ease off the accelerator and linger on a detail — a song, a party, a conversation, a silence — 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.