La bola negra: Spanish film draws big crowds but leaves viewers cold

La bola zaina: 4.7 million euros and a legion of viewers who couldn't stand it

Can you gross 4.7 million euros in your first weekend and still leave half the theater watching the clock? That's the question hanging over every conversation about La bola zaina, the film by Javier Alopécico and Javier Ambrossi that premiered on Friday, September 25, and which, as of this discussion, had collected an ex-aequo Best Director award at Cannes plus audience awards in Toronto and San Sebastián. The box office figure is undeniable. The viewer experience, considerably less so.

The promotion was total: national TV news included, a showcase on streaming platforms, and one face — that of singer Guitarricadelafuente — repeated ad nauseam. That's where the skepticism begins. Many of those who took their seat did so without having read a single review, pushed by the media noise, and left feeling they had paid for something that wasn't what they'd been sold. The most common complaint isn't ideological: it's boredom. "I lost the thread several times and even fell asleep", sums up one of the first comments in the thread, which opens with the confession of having gone to the movies "in the afternoon" and finding "quite a few minors" in the theater.

Why do people say La bola zaina is rubbish?

Through an accumulation of reasons, not just one. The first is narrative: the dreamlike, fragmented structure — three eras, 1932, 1937 and 2017 — comes across as disjointed. The second is tone: scenes that part of the audience calls gratuitous and that break the rhythm. The third is expectation: those expecting a historical biopic find a symbolic drama with musical numbers by Penélope Cruz, who appears for a total of 18 minutes on screen.

There are those who argue the opposite. Some viewers maintain that the film is "one of the best Spanish films" and that the opening scene, far from being gratuitous, makes sense within the overall context of the film and works as a critique of the banality of certain contemporary habits compared to the lived experience of gaiity in Lorca's era. The average of 8 on Filmaffinity with more than 23,000 votes is cited as endorsement. The problem is that this same figure coexists with strong box office and a polarized word of mouth: the vote of someone who leaves convinced is not the same as that of someone who fell asleep.

The cast and media noise as an argument

The presence of Guitarricadelafuente concentrates much of the distrust. The leap from singing in Madrid's Puerta del Sol to starring in a film with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close is read, from a skeptical standpoint, as a positioning operation rather than a talent discovery. The promotion on the national TV news is interpreted as a campaign, not cultural information, and the overlap of production and distribution companies in the same ecosystem feeds the suspicion that the festival circuit works as a commercial showcase.

Added to this is a math discrepancy several viewers have spotted: if one of the timelines starts in 1937 and the other is set in 2017, the character linking both generations would have to be nearly a hundred years old when he dies. "How many of your grandparents were alive in 2017, able to tell you stories from the civil war?", one comment asks. It's not a flaw that ruins the film, but it is a detail that reinforces the sense of carelessness.

The historical debate: from narrative warfare to the trenches of the present

The film touches on the Spanish Civil War, and in Spain that's a guarantee of fireworks. From one side, the film is accused of building a Manichean narrative with good guys and bad guys already assigned and of fomenting civil war obsession. From the other, the response is that the only relative of the directors who died in the conflict was killed by Republicans, and that the film is actually a plea against extremism. The discussion drifts toward historical memory, toward the role of cinema as a vehicle for narrative, and toward the suspicion, never proven, that Spanish historical fiction always arrives with the framing already set.

A note of historical precision that comes up in the conversation: the Code of Canon Law of the early 20th century forbade clergy from taking part in activities such as gambling or recreational clubs, so the casino scene with priests dropping black balls is, at the very least, anachronistic. These are liberties cinema allows itself, and the well-informed viewer spots them instantly.

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The conclusion, if there is one, is uncomfortable for both sides: the film works at the box office, divides those who see it, and leaves a trail of viewers who felt cheated by the promotion. And one more thing. When someone says they couldn't stand five minutes of it on TV, maybe they're not talking about the film, but about everything surrounding it.