La Bola Negra

I cannot personally relate to the film’s central experience—the martyrdom of hidden homosexuality—yet its beauty and emotional force were so overwhelming that I could not speak for fifteen minutes after the credits rolled.

I believe this film is not trying to make me understand what it means to suffer from intolerance and fear, yet it drowned me in empathy. I think the film is, instead, made for those who suffer from intolerance and fear; it is a call to arms, to instill courage and resolve in the hearts of those fighting their own private wars, because what is at stake is nothing less than their own lives.

A collage of styles. Three stories are woven together, slowly revealing how the threads—the silver threads—connect them. The stylized beauty of the 1932 storyline, the dreamlike nature (nightmarish, too) of the 1939 wartime storyline, and the raw, almost documentary quality of the 2017 storyline.

While Carlos dances in a trance at the tasca, the story does not move forward. While the soldiers play naked on the beach, the story does not move forward. While Penelope performs her musical piece, the story does not move forward. The film is sprinkled with these moments. No, not sprinkled—as if they were mere additions. They are just as essential to the whole as the main storyline. This is negative space, ma for the Japanese, that makes the central image possible, visible, memorable. It is a film by Los Javis, after all.

The film juxtaposes the idealized aesthetics of the past with the crude reality of the present. A rough fuck in a hotel room, an unrefined fabada in a bar, a rural lawyer who has undergone a laryngectomy, and the characters played by Carlos González and Lola Dueñas (oh, Lola Dueñas!). For me, Los Javis have perfected Almodóvar’s palette, perhaps because of their generational proximity. Their unfiltered reality grounds me in a recognizable world, only to sublimate it in a shot where emotions explode like fireworks on the beach. Los Javis paint a world where your mother can squat to pee on a construction site and Sebastián can embrace Rafael for one last minute, and life somehow has a time and a place for all of it, and you know all of it to be true.

Because truth is all there is, at the end of the day. Inner truths that are expressed and cost us dearly (Federico!), and inner truths that are not expressed and cost us even more. Carlos, who never truly lived, will melt into the snow, never to be found because he was never really there. “What if they never find me?” he cries at the end—not because he fears his body will never be found after his death, as Federico’s was. Carlos will vanish where Federico will prevail.

Or the tragic realization of Sebastián’s implied character arc, where the cost of living a lie not only hurts him but damages his lineage beyond repair. The blast radius of living in fear extends across generations.

And so the final stretch of the film strikes from every direction, across every timeline, until our hearts are exhausted and defenseless. All that remains is silence, under the unbearable weight of suffering and the uplifting winds of hope.

Only truth can heal.