La bola negra: the silence we inherit

We watched La bola negra in Toronto on 23 October. It affected us deeply. This dispatch gathers our reflections, read alongside what the critics have written.

The film begins from a play Federico García Lorca never finished. In Granada, a young man applies to join the city’s casino, an exclusive men’s club. The members vote with white and black balls. He receives the black ball. Lorca subtitled the play “drama de costumbres actuales”. When he was murdered in August 1936, he had written four pages: a list of characters and a short dialogue between Carlos and his sister. The pages are held at the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada (La Vanguardia; Cadena SER). Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi wrote the film with the playwright Alberto Conejero. It runs some two hours and forty minutes and moves between 1932, 1937 and 2017.

Each period has its own protagonist. In 1932, the Granada club refuses Carlos (Milo Quifes). In 1937, Sebastián (Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, known as Guitarricadelafuente) is drawn into Franco’s Nationalist army. He is set to guard a wounded Republican prisoner, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau). Rafael is modelled on Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, Lorca’s companion and a member of his theatre company La Barraca. Rodríguez Rapún died in 1937. Conejero had imagined his last days in the play La piedra oscura (Sight and Sound). In 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a gay writer and scholar, comes into an inheritance that leads back to the earlier stories (Wall Street Journal). His mother (Lola Dueñas) resists his attempts to repair a broken family (Festival de Cannes).

What the critics say

The film shared the Best Director award at Cannes with Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (Festival de Cannes). At TIFF it won the People’s Choice Award, the first film in a language other than English to do so since 2011 (AwardsWatch). It is Spain’s submission for the International Feature Oscar (Wall Street Journal). In Sight and Sound, Elisabet Cabeza praises its “operatic gusto”. She finds its strength in the emotional excess of classic melodrama more than in realistic history (Sight and Sound). The Rotten Tomatoes consensus describes a film that “movingly testifies to the perseverance of queer identity throughout history” (Rotten Tomatoes).

Where critics have reservations, they concern abundance. The Associated Press admires how seamlessly the editing moves between timelines. It also finds that stylistic flourishes and repetition sometimes weigh the story down (AP). Variety’s Guy Lodge found the running time too long for characters he thought somewhat two-dimensional. He was nonetheless moved by the film’s maximalism (Elle España). The New York Times is absorbed for most of the film but feels it never quite finds its ending (The New York Times en Español). Rolling Stone en Español makes a related point: as the directors explain how the stories connect, some of their mystery fades (Rolling Stone en Español).

Silence as an inheritance

At Cannes, the directors called the impossibility of communicating the heart of the film. It appears in missed video calls, in a hand hovering over an intercom, in silences that last too long. In their account, violence lives in what is left unsaid. Repression changes its face from one era to the next, while its mechanism stays the same. “We don’t pay enough tribute to the fight these previous generations of gay men had to wage,” they said, “to how they were silenced” (Festival de Cannes).

Queer studies offers a precise vocabulary for this. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote that “‘closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence” (p. 3). Silence, in this sense, is an act, one that can be learned and repeated. Psychoanalysis adds a second register. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok described the “phantom”: a secret one generation could not speak, which goes on working in the next as a gap in what can be said or known. Alberto’s inheritance has this structure. He receives something whose meaning was never told. The film follows his effort to give it words.

Feeling backward, looking forward

In Feeling Backward (2007), Heather Love asked queer scholarship to stay with the difficult past before hurrying to redeem it. That past holds shame, isolation and refusal. José Esteban Muñoz opened Cruising Utopia (2009) with the sentence “Queerness is not yet here”. He described queerness as “an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (Cruising Utopia, p. 1). La bola negra stands between these two positions. To finish a play whose author was killed is a utopian act in Muñoz’s sense. The filmmakers themselves describe the film as a ucronía, an imagined history (Artículo 14). The critics’ unease with the final hour can be read in Love’s terms. The film wants to grieve and to repair at once. When it chooses repair, it gives up some of its mystery.

Finitude and the unfinished

Lorca’s four pages stand for finitude imposed from outside: a life ended by violence, a work left suspended. Existential philosophy also helps us think about the generations who come after. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes human existence as thrown into a heritage it did not choose. Authentic historicality, for him, means resolutely taking over that heritage as possibility. Alberto’s story enacts this. What has been handed down to him becomes something he must decide how to carry.

The black ball recalls Sartre’s account of shame as being fixed under the gaze of others. The club turns that gaze into an institution with a vote. Sebastián serves in an army that is destroying people like him. His story places freedom where existential thought has long located it, in choice under constraint. Karl Jaspers called such moments boundary situations, among them struggle, guilt and death.

A note from the lab

We left the cinema thinking of our patients. Many of the older gay men in our cancer and palliative care settings came of age when exclusion was voted on, legislated and enforced. Some bring histories of silence into the clinic. There may be a partner who was never acknowledged, a family held at a distance, or wishes about the end of life that have never been spoken. Our work in sexual and gender diversity in cancer care, and in queer ageing and endings, asks how care can make room for what was never said. La bola negra reminds us that silence is inherited. What is inherited can also be interrupted, in families as much as in institutions.

The film is in cinemas across Canada and the United States over the coming weeks. It arrives on Netflix in both countries on 2 December (Netflix Tudum).