La Bola Negra Is One of the Best LGBTQ+ Movies of the Century

How do you grapple with the magnitude of queer love that has happened in secret? Even today, millions are living and loving in hiding, endless histories buried beneath the soil of hate and prejudice. Multiply that across history, and it’s staggering to consider how much we will never know about desires that didn’t dare speak their name.La Bola Negra, a clear Oscar frontrunner from directorial duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, considers this project, and the impossibility of ever completing it, with an expansiveness that never comes at the expense of intimacy. Weaving together three stories across three timelines in Spain, the film asks us to consider gay love as a sort of submerged genealogy, tying our own contemporary queerness in urban apartments to that of, say, closeted soldiers in Franco’s army — or to the playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated in the name of that same nationalism.Queerness, the film posits, doesn’t follow the same rigid, patrilineal lines as heterosexuality; no, it bleeds through generations, seeping through cracks, resurfacing in notes tucked under floorboards and letters that only two people have ever read.For as ambitious as La Bola Negra’s narrative is — recalling at times The Hours, which similarly spanned multiple timelines — the interconnected story is almost its least interesting quality. In the 1932 timeline, a young man in Granada is denied entry into a social club because there’s word on the streets about how he spends his time in the sheets. In the 1937 timeline, Sebastián (Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente, in his acting debut) is conscripted into the Nationalist army after his village is bombed, only to fall in love with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (a real historical figure, and a partner of Lorca’s, played here by Miguel Bernardeau). And in the 2017 timeline, historian Alberto (Carlos González) uncovers an unfinished Lorca play after his grandfather passes away.To say more about how thes