Some films you watch, and some films you feel. «La bola negra» (The Black Ball), by the directors known as Los Javis, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, is without doubt one of the latter. I left the cinema feeling that I had not seen, or felt, so much cinema in a very long time.
It is a marvellous film, engaging and entertaining, the kind that makes time fly. The staging is impeccable: every shot, every light and every gesture is crafted down to the last detail, yet the artistry never smothers the emotion. Los Javis take as their starting point Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work and Alberto Conejero’s play «La piedra oscura», and weave together three stories from three moments in our history: 1932, in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War; 1937, in the midst of the war; and 2017, in our own time.
What surprised me most is that the film is not as politicised as we in Spain tend to make things. Here, almost everything ends up as a trench, and «La bola negra» had more than enough material to fall into that trap. Yet it does not. It chooses to look at people rather than flags, and that is precisely why it hits so hard.
Because Spain hurts. It hurts to see the country like this, as it once was: a place where passion overflows and where, so often, we forget that we are one nation. By moving between the three eras, the film leaves an uncomfortable question hanging in the air: how much have we really changed? Some wounds we believed had healed are still bleeding on the screen.
For those of us who live in Spain, and especially for those who have chosen to make it their home from abroad, «La bola negra» is far more than a film. It is a way of understanding this country: its beauty, its talent and its boundless capacity both to love and to tear itself apart.
Don’t miss it. And be prepared to leave the cinema with something stirred deep inside.
