“La Bola Negra” (the black ball) won best director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It also won the Toronto International Film Festival Audience Award over runners-up “I Play Rocky” and “Being Heumann.” It also received directing and audience awards nominations at this year’s Gotham Awards.
I can see why the directing award was given at Cannes; with their ostentatious swooping camerawork, staging of war battles, and lavish musical numbers featuring a singing Penélope Cruz, directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo make their presence known for 160 minutes. This is clearly a director’s movie more than anything else.
Legendary helmer Billy Wilder once said that when someone told him a shot was well directed, it was proof that it was not. Respectfully, I must disagree with Mr. Wilder, as there are scenes here that are indeed very well directed. Less respectfully, I must also disagree with the TIFF audience, because this movie did nothing for me. What is supposed to be a tale of queerness as seen across three generations is instead a gimmicky mishmash of styles populated by mostly one-dimensional characters. Only actor/composer Guitarricadelafuente, in the film’s best performance, has a deeply felt character to play. Unfortunately, his segment falls prey to misplaced melodrama involving a prisoner of war and a mysterious manuscript.
“La bola negra” most resembles “The Hours,” the stodgy, time-jumping bore that won Nicole Kidman an Oscar back in 2002. Calvo and Ambrossi bring more energy and pizazz to their movie than Stephen Daldry did for “The Hours,” but their script keeps that film’s aggravating hops back and forth across multiple timelines, the contrived coincidences linked to those jumps, and the tie to a real-life literary figure. Daldry’s film had Virginia Woolf; this film has Federico García Lorca both as a character and a source for the story.
Lorca’s assassination in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War is a plot point in “La Bola Negra,” but the film takes its title from an unfinished Lorca work. In the first timeline, set in 1932, a man named Carlos (Milo Quifes) stands before the Granada casino committee seeking casino membership. The voting members vote positively with a white ball, and negatively with a black ball.
Carlos is blackballed (so to speak) because it’s widely known that he’s a homosexual. In anger, his father sends him back to the casino to demand they take another vote. He is ordered to act as macho as possible to quell the rumors.
In a second timeline, which we actually see before Carlos’ first appearance, the year is (I assume) 1937. Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) and his village are awaiting the arrival of the Italian military, which they think will be a friendly visit. Instead, planes fire from above, obliterating the people and bombing the area. Sebastián escapes, only to be conscripted by the Spanish army. He is put in charge of injured prisoner of war Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau). The army says he’s a rebel whom they’re keeping alive to grill for information before he’s assassinated. Sebastián and Rafael exchange furtive glances as Sebastián falls in love with him, or something like that.
The third timeline takes place in 2017. Alberto (Carlos González) is a gay playwright living openly with his partner (Julio Torres) in Madrid. He receives a call that the maternal grandfather he never knew has died and bequeathed an envelope to him. Alberto’s mother, an abusive alcoholic and cocaine addict, warns him not to travel to the countryside to find out what he’s been given. She inherited her father’s house, which she plans on selling because he deserted her mother decades earlier. Alberto discovers a tie to Lorca that he investigates with the help of a Lorca scholar played by Glenn Close.
“La Bola Negra” alternates between these plots in ways that aren’t random, but they’re also more irritating than compelling. Once the coincidences start lining up, the screenplay uses its queer angle as a dramatic crutch rather than as a gauge to show how far we’ve come since the earlier timelines. The surprise appearances by a Spanish speaking Close and a fiery, singing Cruz enliven the proceedings (they’re both good here), but they don’t do much to advance the plot.
I assume the TIFF audience was moved by the journey these characters take. Alas, I felt nothing. The 35mm print I saw looked gorgeous, and the directors staged some well-executed set pieces, But “La Bola Negra” played like three interesting, interconnected episodes whose scripts were thrown into the air. Then the filmmakers shot the pages in the order they landed.
★★
LA BOLA NEGRA
Written and directed by Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo. Based on “la bola negra” and other works by Federico García Lorca. Starring Guitarricadelafuente, Milo Quifes, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close. At Coolidge Corner (35mm), AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport. 160 minutes. R (nudity, sex, violence — all graphic)
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.