In Defense of La Bola Negra

This essay contains spoilers for La Bola Negra.In a review that has sent shockwaves through the corner of social media in which an Oscars race feels like it has existential consequences, New Yorker critic Justin Chang wrote that La Bola Negra filmmakers Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo “mean to erect a cinematic monument for the ages,” but instead produced “a film that insists, arrogantly and aggressively on its own monumentality.”Elsewhere in his scathing critique, Chang writes that the Spanish awards season hopeful “wants to be a sweeping historical epic of gay longing,” grading it poorly against that high benchmark. Means to, insists, wants…. If you’re that, well, insistent on assigning metatextual agency to a film, you better be damn sure you’ve got a good read on its aims. Especially if you think it’s “arrogant.”Of course, if you believe that a pair of directors have set out with a grandiose mission in mind, you’d be inclined to judge them harshly if you also believe they failed. One isn’t supposed to want to make an epic, I suppose; at least if you’re not one of the handful of filmmakers we’ve already given collective permission to approach the three-hour runtime.But as a critic with just as much access to Los Javis’ deepest intentions as Chang has — which is to say, none — I suspect he has dramatically misread the film’s ostensible “wants.” La Bola Negra is not trying and failing to be a “monument,” it is taking a core feeling and dragging it through history like a sponge through a spill until it is saturated. It is not a queer epic in the sense that it is an epic with a queer narrative; rather, it is a queer epic in the sense that it interrogates what qualifies as “epic” in the first place.La Bola Negra plays out against the sort of backdrops viewers might associate with the “epic” appellation: a country-consuming civil war, fascist repression, the tragic death of a renowned artist. But here, the phenom