The Black Ball is a narrative triptych about the lives of three different Spanish men at various times: a meditation derived from Lorca about the secret history of gay men’s sexuality, which has been erased, excluded or denied – sexuality transfigured into a mysterious, restorative poetry of the soul. In Lorca’s words, “only mystery keeps us alive” and in fact the small regret I have about this superlatively acted and beautifully shot film is that once the connection between the three narrative strands is explained, some of the mystery and poetry is lost.
In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is a young man of a good family in Granada, who applies for membership of the elite “Casino” club but is turned down on the grounds of his rumoured homosexuality, blackballed in an oppressively elaborate ceremony presided over by politicians and clergymen, in which the white and black balls are solemnly rolled down a special chute. In 1939, Sebastián (played by the actor and musician Álvaro Lafuente Calvo) finds himself chaotically enlisted into the pro-Franco nationalist army during the civil war and falls in love with the wounded Republican prisoner-of-war that he is supposed to be guarding. This is Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), an actor and footballer with Atlético Madrid, an impossibly handsome, captivatingly vulnerable man whose bandages ooze blood like the tears of a miraculous statue.
And in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González) is a student and failed playwright doing postgraduate research into queer identities and transgressive themes in the popular music of the 1920s; he receives a strange bequest from his late grandfather which worsens his relationship with his depressed and rage-filled mother Teresa (played by Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas). Over lunch with him she argues, drinks heavily and does a line of cocaine. Perhaps inevitably, it is in our banal contemporary world that the gay man is not exquisitely beautiful. (Pedro Almódovar is a producer on the movie and is slyly referenced in one scene.)
The Black Ball begins with a bravura sequence in the 1939 strand: a remote village is preparing to salute Mussolini’s fascist forces with banners and a band and Sebastián, almost childlike in his ignorance of politics, is really interested only in playing his trumpet. But the Italians accidentally attack the poor pro-nationalist villagers — who will perhaps have therefore learned a lesson about the callous stupidity of fascism — and Sebastián finds himself scrambling through the rubble of the bombed-out church and climbing across its smashed statue of Saint Sebastian, that time-honoured symbol of ambiguous male sensuality, actually using the arrows in his stone flesh as handholds, an oddly witty symbolism. Effectively press-ganged into the Francoist troops, Sebastián finds himself going with them to see a raunchy nightclub show given by the Madrid singer Nené — a wonderful cameo from Penélope Cruz.
In 1932, Carlos goes into a state of defiant shock after being turned down, drifting through bars in a kind of alcoholic haze, unsure whether to deny the charge, as his father tells him, or to defiantly tell them that it is true. Meanwhile, in 2017, Alberto’s distraught mother has brutal things to tell him about how his fascist grandfather would have despised him for being gay, and we can see how an unnamed trauma has actually been inherited by Teresa.
The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.