Netflix’s Epic Answer to ‘The Odyssey’ Has Arrived

Carla Oset/Netflix Netflix has pinned many of its Oscar hopes on La Bola Negra— and for good reason.

A gay historical epic that, with its lush melodrama and tragic romanticism spread across multiple time frames, resembles Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Academy Award-winning The English Patient crossed with Claire Denis’ 1999 critical darling Beau Travail , Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s film feels both old and new.

Sweeping and poignant even when its schematic seams show, it’s a moving saga about the knotty ties that bind us to our pasts—and, with any luck, are slowly unknotted—which suffuses its conventions with heft and heart.

Premiering in theaters on Oct.

16 after celebrated showings at the Cannes, Toronto, and San Sebastián film festivals—and streaming on Netflix starting Dec.

2— La Bola Negra draws on Federico García Lorca’s unfinished play of the same name.

Lorca wrote just four pages of that incomplete work before being killed in 1936, and the first of Calvo and Ambrossi’s three narratives dramatizes it, with Carlos (Milo Quifes) visiting a casino in 1932 Granada to learn whether he’ll be granted membership.

The answer, it turns out, is no, as the older, dark-suited gentlemen who run the place largely vote in the negative with black balls because, as subsequently becomes clear, they oppose the white-suited Carlos’ homosexuality.

As Carlos endures this unpleasant decision and, shortly thereafter, is ordered by his father to return to the casino to demand another vote, La Bola Negra simultaneously concentrates on Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente).

A trumpeter living in a small rural town with his mother in 1937, the musician narrowly survives an attack during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers and, to stay alive, joins the country’s Nationalist army.

Sebastián is a sensitive would-be artist who’s not cut out for his new vocation, and this becomes more pronounced when he’s tasked with guarding prisoner Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a “red” who’s badly injured and for whom he slowly develops feelings, further attracting his comrades’ suspicions.

La Bola Negra doesn’t initially denote Carlos’ story as Lorca’s final (partial) play, nor does it immediately elucidate the connection between these plot strands and its 2017-set action involving Alberto (Carlos González), a failed playwright who lives in Madrid with his boyfriend Juan Pablo ( SNL alum Julio Torres) and who’s researching 1920s-era queer music recordings.

He puts this pursuit on the back burner when he’s informed by a lawyer that his maternal grandfather has died and left him an inheritance.

Because his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), is intensely hostile to any discussion of this matter, getting answers about his ancestor requires a trip to Cantabria.