by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Miguel Bernardeau, Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Julio Torres, Glenn Close
Intro:
… the film’s audacity and showmanship give way to a self-satisfied earnestness about the power of art to change the world, and for historic wrongs to be righted with poetry.
The Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award is a dubious honour: chosen entirely by audiences, it can reward brilliant films that resonate with the public and go on to awards glory (12 Years a Slave, La La Land, Hamnet,), as well as works of cheap sentimentality and unearned emotion, which also go on to awards glory (The Imitation Game, Green Book, Jojo Rabbit). This year’s winner, La Bola Negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, falls somewhere between the two poles, offering both brilliant filmmaking and extravagant emotion that are sure to find favour with Academy voters.
The film borrows both its title and its conceit from an unfinished play by the 20th Century playwright Federico García Lorca. Expanding the original text, the filmmakers tell the story of Carlos (Milo Quifes), a son of a patrician family in 1932 Granada who is seeking entry into the ‘Casino’ club of the city’s elite. But Carlos is gay, and not especially discreet, so, for all his pomade and elegant suits, he finds himself ‘blackballed’ — the bola negra of the film’s title.
Interwoven with this strand is the story of Sebastían (the musician Guitarricadelafuente), who in 1939 is a soldier without conviction in Franco’s fascist forces. After surreal, camp scenes of war and destruction — including a sequence in which he scales a marble bust of Saint Sebastian — he finds himself guarding a captured soldier (Miguel Bernardeau) from the opposing Republican forces. With the soldier bearing military secrets, intimate poetry, and smouldering good looks, a tragic romance cannot but ensue.
The final thread of the film takes place in 2017 Madrid, where disillusioned writer Alberto (Carlos González) swipes on Grindr and fights with his mother. But when the grandfather he never knew dies, he leaves Alberto an inheritance that links him to the earlier stories and to the history of queer resistance.
The two directors deserve credit for finding life in the history here: the Spain of the 1930s is brought alive in its sound and colour and homoerotocism, their camera equally adept at tracing a man’s body dancing in a bar as dying on the battlefield. Some sequences give the directors the opportunity to run wild with vigorous sustained shots — including an electric cameo by Penélope Cruz as an entertainer for the troops. The actors all acquit themselves admirably, even if Guitarricadelafuente and Bernardeau look too pretty and soft to be in a war.
But the film’s audacity and showmanship give way to a self-satisfied earnestness about the power of art to change the world, and for historic wrongs to be righted with poetry. There’s nothing wrong with art making a case for itself — and Australia for one needs a corrective to its anti-intellectualism — but here it means losing the rough edges and contradictions of life in favour of a political message: the fascist soldier does not believe in a single tenet of fascism, the words of the poet are never less than profound, and desire never inflicts any harm.
What stands out in 2026 is the lost history of queerness as a political identity, how it once stood as the antithesis of fascism and conformity, a threat to the patriarchal order, and a force that could seduce enemies in uniform. Now, the far-right forces in Germany — polling ahead of every other party—are led by a lesbian who demonises the transgender community, while gay men serve in Trump’s cabinet and Barnaby Joyce can claim that One Nation is the ‘gayest party’ in Australia.
But La Bola Negra is less interested in these complications than it is in celebrating itself with aplomb — and it will surely have more to celebrate come Oscar time.
