Posts Tagged ‘French film gay interest Cannes indie film’

La Bola Negra (2026) Cannes Film Festival 2026

Dirs: Javier Calvo – Javier Ambrossi | Spain Drama 155′

La Bola Negra (Black Ball) is certainly a rambunctious spectacle detonating gay pride in the final days of this  year’s Cannes Film Festival. Wrapped in the weight of history, memory and queer reclamation, it takes the form of an ambitious triptych stretching across Spain in 1932, 1937 and 2017.

Haunted by the legacy of Federico García Lorca (Bodas de Sangre) and inspired by fragments of his unfinished work, alongside Alberto Conejero’s La piedra oscura, the film sets out to connect generations of gay men separated by repression, silence and political violence. And boy – have they made up for lost time.

The structure is sprawling but initially compelling, told in past and present in parallel narratives. It follows Sebastián (singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente) a young Republican soldier in love with Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a figure linked to Lorca’s own emotional history. In the contemporary strand, Alberto (Carlos González) struggles with inherited trauma and a difficult relationship with his mother (Lola Duenas), while Milo Quifes’ Carlos represents a younger generation searching for connection in the shadow of buried histories. This is all jazzed up by vignettes from Penélope Cruz (a scarlet-lipped diva) and Glenn Close, an American novelist, each lending the film a heightened theatricality.

For its first hour, La Bola Negra is genuinely intoxicating. The opening scene is impressive – an Italian air raid accidentally obliterating a small Andalusian village. The imagery is lyrical, often ravishing, with Calvo and Ambrossi embracing a kind of operatic queer melodrama that merges poetry, music and historical memory into something visually magnetic. The film’s shifting timelines echo one another elegantly at first, and the directors’ passion for excavating erased queer histories gives the project emotional urgency. Certain sequences — particularly those involving Cruz — have the grandeur of old Spanish cinema filtered through contemporary queer iconography. And Guitarricadelafuente is certainly an eye-full as the film’s connective tissue. With his gorgeous locks and brooding ‘come-to-bed eyes’, he gives a  performance exuding vulnerability and soulfulness although his passionate obsession for lover Rafael is met with nonchalance.

Gradually the film begins to shatter under the scale of its desire to trumpet the message to the world. At 155 minutes, Bola Negra becomes exhausting rather than immersive, the storytelling back-seated by the film’s determination to announce its cultural and political significance. The emotional through-line is repeatedly interrupted by indulgent dream imagery, prolonged symbolic passages and sequences staged less for dramatic necessity than for reverence toward its own queer mythology.

What begins as a moving exploration of repression and inheritance slowly hardens into a monument to itself. The directors are so intent on foregrounding the film’s queer credentials and historical mission that the characters are often reduced to vessels for statements about identity and memory rather than fully realised people. The themes remain powerful — silence, generational trauma, the erasure of gay lives from Spanish history — but they drown beneath layers of spectacle and solemnity.

There is no denying the ambition of La Bola Negra, nor the sincerity behind it, and that’s to be congratulated. Cannes audiences have embraced it passionately, and its visual confidence is undeniable. Yet the film ultimately mistakes magnitude for depth. By the end, what should feel transcendent instead feels over-extended: an undeniably important work that loses sight of the human story beneath the pageantry.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION

 

The History of Sound (2025)

Dir: Oliver Hermanus | Drama 2025 127′

Reviewed by Meredith Taylor

The History of Sound is a slow-burning gay love story about two men who make country music with a focus on singing and recording in the early 1920s Kentucky.

With its sober look and drab colour palette this latest drama from Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) feels conventional and often laborious but with its attention to detail and thoughtful performances from two of contemporary cinema’s top stars it will certainly do well at the box office and appeal to a niche audience who appreciate the tentative unfolding of a missed opportunity involving misinterpreted romantic feelings.

Kentucky, Rome, Boston, and eventually Oxford and the Lake District, lend some colour and a additional dimension to this contemplative canvas enabling the South African director to paint a nuanced portrait of gay love in the early 20th century. Paul Mescal plays Lionel, a modest Kentucky country boy who grew up on a farm and has few ambitions and little to offer the world apart from a tuneful singing voice with perfect pitch which will eventually take him to the Boston conservatory with apparent ease.

Despite his humble background Lionel manages to be surprisingly dapper and well-turned out in every immaculately-staged scene. Quiet and deliberate he is certainly no tortured artist striving to succeed. But what he does yearn for is a closer relationship with another, more confident man, a singer called David (Josh O’Connor) who he meets along the way. Of course it takes him time to realise all this and when he eventually does the world has moved on.

Through their shared love of music Lionel and David develop a close bond of friendship that eventually turns sexual. But David remains a sketchy, enigmatic character, even when we discover more about him at the end. All this latent sense of pent up feeling between the two men is never fully developed merely suggested in a brief intimate scene and Lionel’s wanton glances in a railway station but that subtlety is probably the film’s most valuable takeaway, along with the elegantly framed settings – unless of course you have an interest in the development of early 20th century sound recording. @MeredithTaylor

Stranger By The Lake (2013) Arte.com

Dir: Alain Guiraudie | Cast: Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d’Assumçao, Jérôme Chapatte | 100’ | French with subtitles | Thriller

Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger on the Lake is the kind of film that makes a lasting impression. Revisiting it, now on Arte.com, nearly fifteen years later it’s still disturbing, sensual and utterly absorbing, although this gay thriller may initially seem to have little to offer mainstream audiences. Yet what unfolds is a gripping psychodrama, played with naturalistic performances that feel uncannily real, building towards an enigmatic, unsettling ending that refuses to tie everything up neatly.

Set at a lakeside cruising spot for gay men in southern France, the film immerses us in a secluded world where the men swim, sunbathe, flirt and form fleeting connections. Guiraudie captures the sensuality of the setting through natural ambient sounds, sparky, realistic dialogue and an uncluttered visual style. The lake and surrounding vegetation become an almost perfect stage for the sinister events that gradually emerge.

Handsomely built but hard-edged, Michel (Christophe Paou) is a regular at this hedonistic idyll. He swims each day, cruises for casual encounters and exudes a dangerous confidence. When a man is found drowned after an encounter with Michel, the question becomes increasingly disturbing: is Michel a sexual predator, or is something more complicated at work? Guiraudie wisely leaves much open to interpretation, deepening the film’s atmosphere of unease.

The tension is generated less through conventional thriller mechanics than through body language, silences and fragmentary conversations. Like a game of cat and mouse, we are drawn steadily deeper into the intrigue, never quite certain how much we should trust what we see.

Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is attracted to Michel like a moth to a flame. Easy-going, open and emotionally vulnerable, he becomes increasingly fascinated by a man whose danger is becoming impossible to ignore. With Michel involved elsewhere, Franck develops a chatty friendship with Henri (Patrick D’Assumçao), a portly, newly single man who is depressed at spending the August holidays alone. Henri appears dismissive of the cruising scene but is clearly fascinated by its rituals and possibilities.

One evening, Franck witnesses Michel drowning a man in the lake. Rather than extinguishing his desire, the knowledge seems to intensify it. Guiraudie captures that unsettling moment when powerful attraction overwhelms rational judgement: Michel is plainly dangerous, yet Franck is drawn towards him with a fascination that he cannot—or will not—resist.

The result is a simmering sense of danger beneath the languid calm of the lakeside. Guiraudie creates an atmosphere in which sexual allure, loneliness and risk become almost inseparable. His intention was not simply to make a film about casual sex, but to evoke the overwhelming emotion of falling passionately in love. The film succeeds in making that attraction feel both exhilarating and terrifying.

There are quirky, almost humorous moments that work beneath the surface, while the everyday conversations give the film an intelligent, thoughtful texture. The characters happen to be gay rather than straight, and Guiraudie treats their sexuality as entirely natural, avoiding sensationalism. Even the police investigation is handled with a matter-of-factness that suggests the casual marginalisation of this secluded gay community.

The performances throughout are spontaneous and utterly convincing, particularly Deladonchamps and Paou, whose uneasy chemistry drives the film. By turns provocative, sinister, funny and mesmerising, STRANGER BY THE LAKE becomes a meditation on sexuality, solitude, obsession and the seductive power of danger.

The lakeside itself feels almost like a jungle, where animals prowl quietly and engage in an ancient power play: some hoping to conquer, some hoping to be conquered, others simply enjoying the ritual. Guiraudie’s deliberately enigmatic finale leaves us questioning what we have witnessed and resisting any easy interpretation.

Enigmatic, disturbing and mesmerising, STRANGER BY THE LAKE is a modern classic that stays with you.

NOW ON ARTE.com

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