La Bola Negra review: A lavish crowd-pleaser of the old school

La Bola Negra

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Director: Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo

Cert: 15A

Starring: Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close

Running Time: 2 hrs 39 mins

Staggering out of Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s Spanish epic, following its premiere at Cannes, I was among several fanning armpits to counteract overstimulation. We have a lot of movie for you here. This is mostly, though not entirely, a compliment.

Treating the gay experience from 1932 up to the 21st century, La Bola Negra feels like a lavish crowd-pleaser of the old school. Where else will you get Penélope Cruz turning up to randomly warble a few tunes and throw around some colourful rejoinders? It’s a musical. It’s a melodrama. It’s a clattering ride down a bumpy hill. Better an excess of movie than a deficit.

Taking its title from that of an unfinished work by the great Federico García Lorca, La Bola Negra jags between three connected yarns. In the early 1930s, Carlos (Milo Quifes), a young gadabout, is – by way of literal blackballing – rejected from membership of an exclusive club after rumours circulate about his homosexuality.

Later in the decade, as the civil war tears Spain apart, the talented trumpeter Sebastián (the impressively mononymic Guitarricadelafuente), after surviving an attack from Italian aircraft in his rural village, finds himself pressed into the Nationalist forces. Somehow or other, he is tasked with guarding the injured Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau) – a real-life Republican who was Lorca’s lover – and is required to extract intelligence from him. They become close.

Fully 80 years afterwards, Alberto (Carlos González), a diffident young historian, receives an inheritance that ties the three strands together as it forwards the film’s commitment to championing the nation’s queer polity.

La Bola Negra has its occasional stutters. Glenn Close’s bafflingly irrelevant appearance as a US Lorca boffin feels like the sort of incongruous English-language episode one saw shoehorned into internationally financed Europuddings during the 1990s. At least one fantastic interlude has all the tasteful transcendence of a lavatory-paper commercial.

For the most part, however, this is heroic film-making at an exultant pitch. The revelations that cascade over the closing act somehow make sense of a plot that hitherto seems to have a score too many layers. The Javiers, as the directors dub themselves, show an extraordinary flair for winding intimacy in with the most grandiose set pieces. This vast construction is held together by committed performances that lean into grand romance.

La Bola Negra will hoover up a mountain of Oscar nominations. It will deserve to win a few.

In cinemas from Wednesday, November 4th