In 1936, Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright, was working on a recent play, La Bola Negra, which was never completed. Only four pa
In 1936, Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet and playwright, was working on a recent play, La Bola Negra, which was never completed. Only four pages of it were found. Later that year, the 38-year-old homosexual anti-fascist sympathizer was executed during the Spanish Civil War on the orders of right-wing military authorities. Ninety years later, Spanish directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have crafted a recent, ambitious film named after these scant remnants. Their glamorous but gritty film stars Spaniards Miguel Bernardeau, of Elite fame, along with Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, the singer known as Guitarricadelafuente, in his first major acting role. La Bola Negra is an epic that spans close to a century; it follows several gay men whose lives are bound together by their identities, love and loss, and the looming presence of the Spanish Civil War, all under the shadow of García Lorca’s work.
There are works of art that escape definitions, pieces of media that transcend. La Bola Negra, both the film and the play, is a biography and a document of war; a love story and a tale of generational trauma; an examination of queerness in Spanish history. The film contains stories that speak of fear, of desire, of guilt, and of shame. And it is a work that defies the uncomplicated summary of a logline.
“So you would like us to craft that sentence for you,” Bernardeau, 29, says, laughing while sitting next to Guitarricadelafuente at a restaurant in Manhattan. He’s athletic and handsome. He comes across as a classic macho onscreen, perhaps a residue of the characters he’s been cast as, but in person he is softer and toasty, thoughtful. His hair is cut in a shaggy semi-mullet, and he’s wearing a Dolce & Gabbana black T-shirt featuring a youthful Monica Bellucci, a vintage find.
