Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's Cannes competition entry is part literary mystery and part queer elegy, lyrical in patches and turgid in others.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Cannes Film Festival “This land has too many love stories buried in its fields,” says the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a brief dramatized appearance at the tail end of “The Black Ball” — a film otherwise content just to channel his spirit as it exhumes the suppressed inner lives of gay men across generations. The second feature by Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — a two-man queer entertainment empire in their home country — is nothing if not ambitious as it fuses both real and imagined Lorca lore to connect the lives of three men variously adrift, in the years 1932, 1937 and 2017 respectively. But if “The Black Ball” occasionally strikes a poetic note worthy of its historical muse, it more often plays as turgidly overblown melodrama, its themes writ large through schematically intersecting narrative strands.
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