Some flowers bloom in the dark. Once La Pola Negra (or Black ball) The rounded edges of the screen begin with a frame of old postcard photographs from the Spanish Civil War. A quick montage, in black and white, shows attractive young soldiers and sailors, their uniforms painted bright pink—an ironic gesture somewhere between imposition and revelation of a hidden and forgotten oddity. This is how the film handles its broad historical imagination, but its basic premise is not to highlight strangeness where it does not exist. Instead, it reimagines (boldly and completely) lost artworks and true stories left in ellipses. If anything, the film’s vision of queer history is one of power deeply and inextricably entangled with, rather than at odds with, the world. The result is a wonderfully moving triptych that simultaneously feels as fresh as a classically staged military epic.
Divided into three distinct timelines, whose relationships gradually become clearer, the film is directed by directors Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo – known together as Los Javes, and who won the Best Director award at Cannes. Homeland‘s Paweł Pawlikowski – evoking Spanish gay history by distilling it from whispers and lost writings. He turns it into painful poetry written on a wide cinematic canvas. One story begins in 1937, when a village naively allied with Mussolini was bombed from the air, by the very nationalists they had hoped to welcome. This sinister premise sees one of the sole survivors of the massacre – a thin, sensitive man named Sebastian (musician Guitar Ricadillafuente in his first film role) – joining this fascist group out of self-preservation, even though they killed his mother.
Elsewhere, in Granada in 1932, a father and son’s story of hidden identities and class divisions unfolds in more operatic tones. A suave young man named Carlos (Milo Cueves) tries to join the ranks of a posh casino and social club, but is rejected by its senior members – they vote him out by picking up black balls; The origin of the term “Blackballing” – due to rumors that he is gay. Finally, nearly a century later in 2017, Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez), a dapper Spanish historian living in Athens, casually swipes Grindr for a connection while trying to decide on a topic for his doctoral dissertation. It ends up being a family drama as well, as Alberto learns of a secret lineage via an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew, although it is told in a more conservative and realistic way than both of the previous stories.
Slowly, then with powerful abandon, these parallel stories intersect through aesthetic resonances, their sounds and images flowing into each other at every leap in time, despite their disparate approaches. While the modern film story is about an openly gay man, vulgarly searching for purpose, the Civil War story is a closeted story of self-discovery—the country boy Sebastian is barely exposed to queer thoughts—while the Casino saga revolves around the question of whether Carlos will stand his ground, or lie for acceptance, no matter how much it hurts him.
Eagle-eyed viewers (and those familiar with Spanish gay poetry) will recognize the latter as a filmed version of the unfinished play from which the film takes its name, written by Federico García Lorca. The playwright himself is a looming, invisible presence throughout much of the film, existing as a spiritual observer just outside the frame (he had been killed by 1936). However, Los Javes’s historical fiction recognizes the themes of hidden desire often addressed by Lorca, even though his eponymous play would have been his first with an explicitly eccentric protagonist, had it been completed.
This sense of loss, and the vulnerability of history, also underscores Sebastian’s narrative, as he is given the task of observing a prisoner of war from the rival Spanish Republican faction, Rafael Rodríguez Rabón (Miguel Bernardo), a handsome gay rebel drawn from history, and with a real connection to Lorca. It’s not long before Sebastian is taken with Raphael, in ways he doesn’t yet understand. However, these themes of oppression are initially at odds with Alberto’s more subdued contemporary epic. The film centers on an openly gay man who slowly comes to terms with his personal and political history, and in the process, places the film’s early twentieth-century stories in the context of an often overlooked continuum.
The film’s three tonally distinct threads are connected by the sense of occasion and momentum that centers gay history—not just as a series of facts, but as distinct emotional undercurrents, which Los Javes forces its viewers to extract from the plot. In their view, gay history is a history of innuendo, anonymity, deception, desire so hot it burns a hole inside you, emotional self-harm, and, ultimately, strained family relationships. It’s even one of the festivals, where Carlos engages in musical festivities powered by dreads. Meanwhile, Sebastian becomes an observer (and indirect participant) in the simple tale of burlesque performer Nene (Penelope Cruz in a thunderous role), whose artistic expression is co-opted by the militarism of the state—a subplot treated with a more critical eye than his fellow queer Cannes contestant. coward. However, Nene’s kindness towards Sebastian also begins to expand his understanding of the world. For example, she was the first person to alert him to the existence of trans people and actors, of whom she says: “Transgender is the fantasy of possibility. War is the opposite.”
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La Pola Negra ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
This idea is key to powerfully deconstructing history in Los Javes, where queerness is undoubtedly a distinct social and political identity, and yet, it is the identity that filmmakers posit as essential to civilization. In a world already torn between oblivion and survival—exemplified by two early twentieth-century men grappling with their place in shifting societies—it falls naturally within the sinuous dynamic that takes shape between violence and self-loathing. If queerness did not exist, a world at war would have to invent it just to eliminate the threat of queerness.
As for Alberto, the modern and sometimes spoiled man whose story stands out in a strange way, La Pola Negra It threatens to congeal into a finger-wagging lecture about how good modern gay men are compared to the suffering of their predecessors. However, he counters this comforting instinct by having Alberto discover and engage with the film’s other stories — along with his fragile familial ties, and his relationship with his estranged mother (Lola Dueñas, played with anxious naturalism). In the process, even Alberto’s tale becomes a tale of belonging, as he slowly finds his place not just in modern society, but in the last century of Spanish history, and—with the help of a historian Lorca played by Glenn Close—within a tradition of Expressionist art and poetry that has been obliterated by shame.
Queer art has always existed in the margins, and while… La Pola Negra‘s aesthetic approach flies in the face of this idea – it’s as mainstream and digestible in form as the studio’s biggest classics – and this is also one of its most influential aspects. Purchasing it through Netflix streaming speaks to the abstract emotion at play and the film’s potential widespread reach, but it also represents life imitating art in serendipitous ways. La Pola Negra He reimagines and builds on art from the margins (including a play about Lorca written by co-screenwriter Alberto Coneiro), but turns it into the kind of lavish, expensive cinematic production that would not have been possible in past years of queer drama. But like the film’s recent explorations of the past—which serve to contextualize historical upheaval—its impending distribution to mass audiences comes preloaded with memories, thanks to a narrative that prompts contemporary viewers to contemplate the long and winding road to this relatively strange normalcy. Alberto’s ability to live such a mundane life becomes imbued with supernatural qualities.
That Los Javes’s film is not radical in form, but rather conventional, is made retrospectively powerful in the process, by its liberated sense of scale – as if the constraints of financial constraints were no longer a factor in cinema of its ilk. Granted, no single film can change the landscape so quickly, but this is the rare time when a strange film feels like interior art, without having to compromise. By the time you dare to reimagine the missing pages of Lorca’s play, it becomes a conversation with history itself, literally embodied through powerful personifications of nature, which settle into their rightful place in an epic of transformative context and transformative longing.
Without giving too much away: A poem appears early in the film’s 155-minute running time, which one of the central characters doesn’t quite understand, until he endures the loss and heartache his lines speak of. La Pola Negra Likewise it justifies its existence, just like the Rorschach test. The filmmakers, like its characters, seem to hope that their work will not be a necessary respite for decades, out of the belief that radical change is not only possible but lasting forever. But until that moment comes, making films like this one less urgent by perpetually moving forward, Los Javes has created a towering war epic that brings together internal and external conflicts on the brink of global change, in ways that open the spirit—making it more open to, more able to bear witness to its joys and its sorrows, to understand its strength and its fragility.
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