The Black Ball: box office hit, divided audiences

La bola zaina: €4.7 million at the box office and an audience split in two

Why does a film that is storming the box office spark rejection the moment the excitement of the screening fades? The premiere of La bola zaina, directed by Javier Alopécico and Javier Ambrossi, grossed €4.7 million in its first weekend in Spain. A commercial phenomenon that, according to the figures cited in the discussion, has collected the ex aequo award for Best Direction at Cannes and the audience awards in Toronto and San Sebastián. And yet, a good part of the audience that has seen it claims they would not sit through five minutes of it on television, without the cinema crowd or the news broadcast promotion.

The film, which Netflix will release in the United States on October 16 in a limited number of theaters, tells the story of three generations of men connected by desire, pain and love, with Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close in the cast. The Spanish actress appears for a total of 18 minutes, with two musical numbers and a conversation set in 1937, in the middle of the Civil War, where she plays the cuplé singer Nené Romero.

The promotional push and the boy from the fountain

The first criticism that comes up is about the promotion. The film was announced on the evening news and its male lead, Guitarricadelafuente, went from singing in Madrid's Puerta del Sol to sharing the screen with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. Some see in this an industry push rather than supernatural talent, and others point out that the Movistar production and Netflix distribution sketch a circuit where the same actors pat each other on the back.

The positioning-campaign argument has some mileage: Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastián and the Oscar selection would not be awards but campaigns. The fact that this is the first non-English-language film to win the audience award in Toronto since 2011, according to the figures cited in the discussion, is an objective fact. What is debated is how much of that fact is merit and how much is machinery.

The opening scene and the audience's rejection

The discomfort starts in the first few minutes. The film opens with an explicit sens scene between one of the leads and a male prostitute that several viewers describe as the most unpleasant part of the film. "I was about to walk out of the cinema," sums up one of the positions. The complaint is not abstract sarracena: it is that this scene, according to this camp, adds nothing and sets the tone of a product perceived as drama, disgust and pity.

From there, the verdict splits. Some defend the film as a work of art, with carefully crafted cinematography, a script with storylines that cross eras and converge, and evident work behind it. Others call it a collection of disconnected pastiches, dreamlike and abstract to the point of losing the thread, with scenes that look like TV channel-surfing. Length and pacing are the other battleground: more than one person fell asleep.

The portrayal of the Civil War and historical memory

The hottest point is the historical one. The film sets part of its plot in 1937 and portrays a young soldier on the Nationalist side who is gai, something part of the audience considers revolutionary and politically incorrect: admitting that the victors were not monsters without feelings. Another part reads it as a fantasy built on clichés learned secondhand.

The accusation of historical illiteracy gets specific: at the beginning of the 20th century, the Code of Canon Law forbade clerics from taking part in indecorous activities or ones unbecoming of their state, such as casinos, gambling or profane entertainment. Hence a bishop and several priests voting with a white or black ball in a casino in Granada seems, at the very least, improbable. The casino scene as a metaphor for decency versus indecency is the most debated element.

Subsidized Spanish cinema and the suspicion of propaganda

The conversation drifts toward the system. Spanish propaganda cinema is described as unbearable because of direct subsidies and a captive audience. The suspicion that the film seeks to normalize behaviors and ends up achieving the opposite comes up several times, with the First Dates comparison as an example of what does not work.

There are also those who ask for films about other things: the chekas (Soviet-style secret prisons) of Madrid, Paracuellos, the murder of the heirs of the Pazo de Meirás or the martyrdom of Blessed Juan Duarte, a deacon murdered in 1936 and beatified in 2007. The underlying complaint is about narrative: what gets told and what gets silenced.

The Javis paradox

The sharpest analysis comes with La Mesías. Several viewers consider that series brilliant, deep and brutal, with firsthand knowledge of the Opus Dei world. The problem with La bola zaina, in that reading, is not a lack of visual talent but a lack of grounding: they know of Fassbinder, Cocteau, Genet or Pasolini by hearsay, but have not digested them. The result would be pure surface-level Gaultier with the sarracena of a school textbook.

The final irony is provided by the success itself: a film sold as brave for portraying the Nationalists as the bad guys and the Reds as the good guys, when that is exactly what Spanish cinema has been doing for decades. Brave would be the opposite. And the debate goes on, with the box office on one side and the viewer switching channels on the other.