Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra stretches across three periods of Spanish history, bringing together real figures, fictional characters and the surviving fragments of Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work in a film about queer lives shaped by repression, desire and everything that gets carried from one generation into the next. Written with playwright Alberto Conejero, the film moves between 1932, the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and 2017, with one of its most affecting threads following two young men who find each other on opposite sides of a war neither of them can escape.
At the center of La Bola Negra is Sebastián, a young musician whose life is abruptly interrupted by the Spanish Civil War when he is pulled from his village and forced into the Nationalist army. Played by Guitarricadelafuente in his first acting role, Sebastián is quiet, deeply sensitive and almost painfully uncomfortable with being seen, carrying himself like someone who has learned very early that attracting the wrong kind of attention can be dangerous. His life changes when he is tasked with guarding Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, played by Miguel Bernardeau, a wounded Republican soldier who slowly becomes the first person to offer Sebastián something resembling hope.
Bernardeau is phenomenal in the role, playing Rafael with a sensitivity and restraint that becomes more impressive the longer the film spends with him. Rafael was one of Federico García Lorca’s great loves and the secretary of his travelling theatre company La Barraca, but La Bola Negra is interested in him as much more than a footnote in somebody else’s life, and Bernardeau approaches him with that same curiosity. Rafael is physically vulnerable from the moment he appears, badly wounded and entirely dependent on the people holding him prisoner, but there is still a confidence to him, an intelligence, humor and curiosity that survives everything happening around him. Even bedridden, he somehow feels completely alive.
The relationship between Sebastián and Rafael begins under the worst possible circumstances. Sebastián has already witnessed enough violence by this point that he seems to have shut down some part of himself simply to survive it. War has taken a young musician and dropped him into an environment where any softness can be interpreted as weakness, surrounded by men who respond to fear by becoming increasingly brutal themselves. For Guitarricadelafuente, that loss of individuality was essential to understanding what has happened to Sebastián by the time Rafael enters his life.
“I think there’s a big parallel when you see the context of war in the film, which is still happening today,” he says. “It makes you aware of how violent human beings are and how war erases any sense of individuality. It makes you more violent, tougher. Showing any sign of weakness becomes something you cannot tolerate.”
Rafael immediately complicates that. Their politics place them on opposing sides, Sebastián is technically his guard and Rafael his prisoner, and there is almost nothing about their circumstances that should allow a relationship between them to develop. It does anyway. Through their conversations about music, theatre, family and the lives they had before the war, Sebastián begins to open up in a way he does with nobody else.
“It was very hard to portray that sense of impossibility in their relationship and how, while the world around them is burning, they find each other,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “They recognize themselves in one another and have no other choice than to trust each other.”
“For Sebastián, at least, it’s the first time he sees a ray of hope in all that madness and hostility of war.”
A great deal of Guitarricadelafuente’s performance changes once that trust begins to form. Sebastián initially seems permanently braced for something bad to happen, nervous whenever attention turns towards him and visibly uncomfortable with anything that might expose too much of what he is thinking or feeling. Around Rafael, some of that tension begins to loosen. Bernardeau never overplays why. Rafael is not presented as some enlightened figure who arrives to teach Sebastián how to understand himself. He is wounded, scared and dealing with his own grief, but Bernardeau gives him an extraordinary warmth. He listens to Sebastián. He teases him. He is curious about him without making Sebastián feel examined.
Some of Bernardeau’s best work happens in those quieter moments. There are scenes where the smallest expression completely changes the temperature of an interaction: the way he watches Sebastián while he talks, the smile that appears when Sebastián catches him off guard, the shift in his face when Lorca comes up. Bernardeau is doing very little and somehow communicating everything, giving Rafael an interiority that extends far beyond whatever information the screenplay can provide about him.
It would have been incredibly easy for Rafael to become more symbol than person. His place in cultural memory has largely been preserved through his proximity to Lorca, but Rafael Rodríguez Rapún was considerably more complicated than simply being “Lorca’s lover.” Born into a working-class family in Madrid, he studied mining engineering, played football, became involved in socialist politics and joined La Barraca, first as an actor and later as the company’s secretary. He eventually volunteered to fight for the Republic and died from wounds sustained on the northern front in 1937, around a year after Lorca’s murder.
That mixture of interests, convictions and contradictions was what Bernardeau found so fascinating about him.
“I felt a great sense of responsibility because he was a real person and we don’t know much about him, but what we do know is very specific,” says Bernardeau. “I was very inspired by what I could read about him and what was said about him.”
“I think he was a very curious man, a very honest man with very strong principles, who couldn’t fit into any box, which I was really attracted to.”
“He was interested in a whole range of different things. Theatre, but also mining engineering. He was a soccer player, but also very much into the arts. His sexuality, too, I think was very complicated. I was very interested in all of that.”
All of that research is present in the performance, but never in a way that feels studied. Bernardeau is not trying to recreate Rafael from the outside or burden every scene with the importance of playing a real person. He builds him from the inside out instead, taking what is known about the man and filling the spaces between those facts with something deeply personal.
“It was a lot about not trying to treat the character as a historical figure, but trying to humanize him and bring as much of myself as I could to the creation of the character,” he explains.
It pays off enormously. Bernardeau gives Rafael a full interior life that never feels beholden to the history waiting for him. He can be playful and flirtatious one moment and seem completely consumed by grief the next. There is anger in him, but also an enormous tenderness. He has principles he refuses to abandon, but Bernardeau never turns that conviction into rigidity. There is no sense that Rafael knows he is going to become part of history. He is simply a young man living through something terrible and trying, wherever possible, to remain himself.
Even when Rafael talks about Lorca, there is something complicated moving behind Bernardeau’s eyes. He misses him. He loves him. There is grief there, obviously, but also the weight of a relationship that existed between two real, imperfect people rather than the romanticized version history can sometimes produce once both of them are gone. Bernardeau plays all of it with an incredible amount of restraint.
The film itself is similarly interested in recovering Rafael as his own person. Alberto Conejero’s La piedra oscura, one of the works that helped inspire La Bola Negra, grew out of his fascination with how little had been preserved about Rapún despite his proximity to Lorca. Bernardeau is working with many of those same absences. There is only so much anybody can definitively know about Rafael now, which leaves the performance somewhere between the fragments that survived and everything an actor can understand about another person.
“I’m very proud and very honored to have been able to play him and, in a way, help give his memory a longer life,” Bernardeau says.
He points to one of Rafael’s lines to Sebastián in the film: “Nobody disappears forever. Nobody.”
“I say that to Sebastián, and I think this is the greatest way for his memory to live on and for him to be remembered. I’m happy about that.”
Rafael died at just 25 years old, and for decades much of what remained of him was filtered through other people: Lorca’s biography, photographs from La Barraca, letters, recollections and eventually Conejero’s play. Bernardeau cannot fill every gap in that history, nor does he try to. What he can do is make Rafael feel like somebody who had an entire life outside the fragments that survived him, and that is ultimately what makes the performance so powerful. He also makes Sebastián’s fascination with Rafael entirely convincing. Rafael represents a kind of openness and certainty that Sebastián has never been allowed to imagine for himself, and Bernardeau gives him enough warmth, humor and complexity that the connection between them never feels like something the screenplay simply needs us to accept.
For Sebastián, that connection is considerably more frightening. There is a moment in La Bola Negra that tells us almost everything we need to know about him, when he tells Rafael about the kind of life he would like to have. Sebastián wants to play music behind the actors in a theatre, dressed in a good suit, able to see everything happening around him while nobody in the audience can see him.
Even when he allows himself to dream of another life, he dreams of being invisible.
“I think he’s constantly not allowing himself to be, as a way of protecting himself,” Guitarricadelafuente says.
Sebastián has spent so much of his life learning how not to attract attention that he does not simply struggle to say what he wants. He has barely been given the opportunity to understand those feelings in the first place.
“He doesn’t have the chance or the tools to understand what’s going on inside him, or even what he’s feeling when he sees Rafael lying in bed, covered in sweat, and feels those palpitations,” Guitarricadelafuente explains.
“There’s this rise of desire in him, this accumulation of feelings that he doesn’t want anyone to notice, because he’s trying to protect himself.”
Guitarricadelafuente is excellent at communicating that confusion, particularly because he never plays Sebastián as somebody secretly sitting on a complete understanding of his sexuality that he is simply afraid to acknowledge. His attraction to Rafael seems to reach his body before he has the language to make sense of it. The singer had never acted before La Bola Negra, but Calvo and Ambrossi became so convinced that he was Sebastián that they were already writing the character with him in mind, drawn to the sensitivity in his music and the interiority they could see in his face.
It proves to be an inspired choice. There is an awkwardness to Guitarricadelafuente that feels completely right for Sebastián, not awkwardness as an actor, but the physical discomfort of someone who has spent his entire life trying to take up as little space as possible. His eyes are constantly moving, registering something before the rest of him allows itself to react. Around Rafael, those reactions become harder to suppress.
Music is the one part of Sebastián’s life that appears entirely his own, the only place where he can express something without having to explain it, and yet even the life he imagines for himself as a musician involves remaining hidden.
“Music is his dream, but at the same time, he doesn’t want anyone to notice that he’s playing,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “In the end, it’s his only way of channeling all of his frustration, his only way of expressing himself.”
“He just wants to experience some joy in his life without anyone paying attention to him.”
There is something devastating in how little Sebastián is asking for. Not success or recognition, not even the freedom to announce who he is to the world. He wants to make music, to feel something good and to be left alone long enough to enjoy it without that happiness becoming another source of danger.
Rafael offers him that space, however briefly. What grows between them cannot undo the world around them, and the film never pretends that it can. Sebastián is still trapped in a war, still frightened by feelings he barely understands, still conditioned to believe that making himself smaller is the safest way to survive. But Rafael gives him a glimpse of something he has never really had before: the possibility of being seen by another person without having to immediately hide whatever they might find. Guitarricadelafuente calls Rafael Sebastián’s “first ray of hope,” and it is difficult to describe him any better.
Bernardeau gives Rafael a similar kind of care. He never allows him to remain only Lorca’s lover, a tragic figure from the past or another queer life reduced to the circumstances of its ending. The Rafael he creates is curious and stubborn, funny and frightened, deeply principled and occasionally contradictory. Most importantly, he feels alive. Bernardeau cannot recover the man history lost, but he can refuse to let the gaps in that history become the entirety of who Rafael was.
By the time Rafael tells Sebastián that “nobody disappears forever,” the line has accumulated far more meaning than either character could possibly know.
Rafael Rodríguez Rapún did disappear from much of the wider cultural memory for a long time.
But thanks, in part, to Bernardeau’s deeply human, incredibly nuanced performance, not forever.
La Bola Negra is now playing in theaters.
