Kazuo Ishiguro on ‘Klara and the Sun’

This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is known for his books Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both of which were adapted into popular movies. His futuristic novel, Clara and the Sun, also has been adapted into a new film, directed by Taika Waititi. Apparently, Ishiguro sought out Waititi's wacky and surreal approach, and consequently, the film diverts from the novel's dark tone. After a bad reception at the London Film Festival earlier this month, the studio cut back the wide release of the film. In reviewing the novel in 2021, our book critic Maureen Corrigan described Ishiguro as, quote, the master of slowly deepening our awareness of human failing, fragility, and the inevitability of death. All that, even as he deepens our awareness, of what temporary magic it is to be alive in the first place. Unquote. Clara and the Sun takes place sometime in the near future. Something has created a great disruption in society. Society is stratified. Privileged people are known as high-ranking, while people who have lost their jobs to very smart machines are known as substituted. The narrator of the book is a human-looking robot, part of a class of robots designed with artificial intelligence, to serve as friends to children and teenagers. It's a society where people are isolated from each other, and children no longer go to school. They learn at home on their devices. We see the world through the eyes of this artificial friend, Clara, who narrates the novel, as she learns about humans and the world around her. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki, after it was decimated by the atomic bomb, and then rebuilt. When he was five, he moved with his family to England, where he continues to live. Terry Gross spoke to him in 2021, when Clara and the Sun first was published. Kazuo Ishiguro, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's been too long, so it's a pleasure to have you back. Does this book have a resonance that you didn't even expect it to have, because of its release during the pandemic? Schools are closed, and in your novel, children don't go to school anymore. People are isolated from one another, and are interacting through their computers. They're learning. Children are learning on their devices. Is that something that. Did you make any tweaks after the pandemic? I mean, the book is new. You wouldn't have had a lot of time to make changes. No, no. If there are any reverberations, they're purely coincidental. You know, I finished the book before the pandemic, and I have to say, you know, it took me completely by surprise. You know, I didn't know something on this scale was coming up. You know, I couldn't have dreamt that, you know, something like this would happen. Maybe in some other sense, you could say, you know, there's an underlying atmosphere of kind of global crisis and things hitting society. I mean, we're talking about, in the novel, I'm talking about a society that is undergoing profound changes, and it doesn't quite know how to reorganize itself. You know, I have to say, the narrator of your novel is the artificial friend, Clara. And who wouldn't want a friend as self-sacrificing and devoted as Clara is, someone who's programmed to learn everything they can about you and to please you? And honestly, I found Clara the most sympathetic character in the novel. I mean, she's pure in a lot of ways, even though she's artificial. It shouldn't be that surprising, really, though, that Clara. An artificial creature could actually solicit our sympathies as much as a human one. I mean, because after all, you know, characters in books are artificial. I mean, we're making that kind of leap anyway. When we read books and get weepy over the fate of some character, we're not weeping over a real person. You know, we've put ourselves into. some kind of space where we're relating to kind of created beings. And at some level, we're responding metaphorically because we think it impinges in some metaphorical relationship to our real lives, I suppose. So I never thought it was going to actually be an intrinsic problem in terms of how my readers would feel because my main character was artificial. Clara is seeing the world and people in the world, as an outsider. She's programmed to know the things that she knows. But she's learning about, like, human emotion and she's learning about people and about the outside world from experience. And the more experience she has, the more she understands about emotion and feelings. So what is the advantage to you as a writer writing from the point of view of such an outsider who's apart from. from the world and is just kind of learning about it? I think I've always been drawn to, throughout my career, to narrators who are, in one way or the other, quite a bit on the outside. But Clara was especially interesting for me because she doesn't bring any baggage with her. It's not like, you know, she has her value system, which kind of clashes with what she finds. She's like a tabula rasa at the beginning. And she's quite childlike and very open. And so that was, you know, it's not just the way, the very restricted way in which she actually reads the world that appealed to me. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her. I wanted her to remain like a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world. Even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies. Do you want to explain what lifted means in your book or would that be giving too much away? Oh, I don't mind. No. The lifted is just the expression that's used colloquially in the book for kids who've benefited from gene editing. They've been enhanced by gene editing. Now, this is something that is, you know, already possible today. It's just that we don't quite have the final technical tools to do things, but we're almost there. I mean, the gene technology of genetic technology CRISPR has actually completely revolutionized the field. And the two women who pioneered that just won the Nobel Prize December just past. So I think this is something everyone will hear about much more. But basically, yes, I mean, some kids receive treatment at some point early in their lives, which enables them to be more intelligent, quote, unquote, perhaps more athletic, certainly less prone to various kinds of illnesses. And so that makes them, by one set of values, they're higher up the hierarchy. You know, they deserve, they deserve better jobs, better education, more responsible positions in society. So we're having, we're seeing a kind of caste system developing between kids who've been lifted and kids who haven't. And in the, in "Clara and the Sun," I mean, we look at two teenagers who've grown up very fond of each other, and they're on either side of this divide. - Clara is solar powered, but the solar powered battery, or, you know, power source, has a limited lifespan. Because she and other artificial friends need the sun to stay powered, to stay alive, she thinks of the sun as God, and basically prays to it, asking for help, asking for interventions when she needs it, promising to do good things in return. She doesn't understand that the sun isn't a god, that the sun doesn't live in the place where she sees it set every night, that the sun can be too harsh for human beings, and I assume that's in part because of the disappearing ozone layer that also she doesn't understand. Is this a way of expressing what you think of religion, that it's a kind of false premise, in a way, that we create gods because we misunderstand our own creation, our own self? - I don't think I was trying to be critical of religion. I just thought Clara would reflect that aspect of humanity. Like, she reflects other aspects of humanity. And this isn't something that she really learns, as you point out, from humans. I mean, many other things she learns when she gets out into the human world, and she becomes more and more human-like. But this is something that's there from the start, because she's solar-powered, I suppose. And it's perfectly logical for her to think the sun is the source of all nourishment, as far as she and her fellow AFs in the store are concerned. But then when she looks out, the shop window into the street, it kind of makes sense to her that the sun is actually nourishing everybody. And that's the way it looks. There are these big tall buildings and the sun is coming down in shafts and people are being nourished by the sun. They're happy when the sun comes out. So she holds onto this belief, I suppose, that the sun is the source of good things and that the sun is always watching over everybody. And when she needs to save the family that she lives with from impending heartbreak, the sun is naturally the person that she turns to. I mean, the sun is a person for her. And she goes to ask the sun's help. I mean, you could say this is like a religious instinct or whatever, but I mean, I found it very interesting to remove the usual kind of the social context away, you know, take it away and just. have it in this rather pure, naive, artificial being that she too could actually repeat these patterns of belief and faith. And that there should be something rather touching about it. I thought that was quite interesting. Your father was an oceanographer. Am I right in saying that he was an engineer? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I mean, he was like an inventor. When I was growing up, I didn't have any sense that, like the machines in my life were invented by somebody, you know, like they existed and they were, you know, I didn't understand how they worked. But with your father having like created things, because I think one of the things or machines, I'm not sure what it was exactly that he created is in a museum in England. Did you have a sense growing up that like technology is created by people, that people actually do that, that there are not things that just exist? Yeah, I think I probably did. My father spent his whole life, his working life, just creating this one machine. He had a little department under him. That's why we were in Britain, because the British were funding his research. And he just made the one machine. It wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like Steve Jobs, you know, I'm going to make this and then launch this. He just worked on this one machine that could predict storms at sea. And, you know, I think that's a very important thing. I think that's a very important thing. And yeah, as you say, I mean, that machine is now not in just any museum, it's in the Science Museum in London. You know, that's the main big museum for science in London, in the United Kingdom. And so I'm very proud of that. But yes, I grew up, although I grew up with this kind of, with a lot of science in the family, one of the things that I now kind of regret, and perhaps, hold myself accountable for, is the fact that I didn't take any advantage of it. I think there's this kind of severe barrier between the world of the humanities and the arts on the one side and science on the other. And I was probably, you know, I kind of imbibed something of that climate. Maybe there's less of it in the United States, I don't know. And so, you know, I didn't, I wasn't nearly as interested in science as I should have been. And from a very early age, I kind of siloed myself off in the world of books and music. And I kind of thought science didn't have very much to do with me. And it's only, you know, in old age, as I am now, I realized how much the world of science and the rest of the world, you know, the world that authors live in, are just interconnected. Let's talk about your work. Your life. So you were born in Nagasaki in 54? Do I have that right? Yeah, yeah. November 1954. Okay. So, you know, it's, it's, it's after the war, how much of Nagasaki was rebuilt? It was completely, it was completely rebuilt. Yeah. So I didn't have any, any real direct sense of this place being, you know, where the atomic bomb fell. It was just this thing that adults sometimes, many of us, we don't know. We don't know what it was, but we don't know what it was. We don't know what it was. Did they sometimes mention it because they wanted to protect children like you from hearing about it? Well, I don't know what they did with each other when they were in their private moments. I mean, they must have lost so many people dear to them and so on. So I imagine there were more serious, you know, earnest and bereaved conversations, even then a decade later. But I, it wasn't even like a taboo thing. I remember, you know, when I was a child and all the time I was growing up in England, you know, my parents would just refer to it almost like a marker in time or something that happened in the way that people would refer to the war. You know, they would refer to the Genshi Bakudan, you know, the atomic bomb. So, you know, they might say that bridge was there, but, you know, it disappeared during the atomic bomb. Or they might be telling a story, a funny story about a friend and an anecdote or something. And then it might just kind of end with, ah, but she died during the atomic bomb. You know, and it wasn't for me any different to the way I heard many of my young English friends, you know, talk about the war. They would say, oh, you know, so my, you know, my granddad, you know, died in the war or something like this. And so I didn't really think it was anything that special. Until, well, I was much older, you know, until I was about eight or nine. And, and I was living in England and I kind of learned almost in a schoolboy way by looking, I actually saw this in an encyclopedia that Nagasaki was, you know, one of only two places that had been atom bombed. And I, I remember feeling a kind of pride. I think, oh, I come from one of the, one of only two places to have suffered an atomic attack. Yeah. So it was a strange kind of relationship with the atom bomb. But of course, you know, I had parents who, who thought about it in a certain way. My mother particularly, you know, because she was there at the time. Well, your mother survived the bomb, right? I think your father was working in China at the time. Yeah, he wasn't there, but my, my mother was there. My, all my mother's side of the family were there. How did your mother survive? Well, I mean, a lot of people survived. I mean, this is what people don't kind of quite understand. I mean, we were talking about what by, even by the standards of the 1960s were primitive, you know, atomic bombs. And so, unlike Hiroshima, you know, Nagasaki wasn't a direct hit. And so, you know, a lot of people, I mean, my, my mother's house, I mean, she was a, she was then a teenager living with her, you know, parental family. A lot of kind of, it was just the kind of the blast. The, the kind of the air had actually kind of blown out things. But, you know, they weren't that aware of it. And my mother, ironically, because she'd been hit by a flying roof tile, she was resting at home to recover from her injury. And the rest of the family went to the stricken parts of the city. And they saw, I think, you know, horrible things. And, and indeed, you know, her father died of leukemia. Not long afterwards. And, but people didn't know about things like that then. So a lot of my, my images of, of, of that time really come from my mother's perspective as somebody who was almost like a spectator, but with this kind of big unspoken thing, when the family members would come back to the house after, well, helping, which actually in practice meant burning heaps and heaps of bodies. Did your family describe things that they'd seen? Not to me, you know, you know, I was a boy. No, I mean, I was a small boy, you know, in Nagasaki, you know, three years old, four years old and five years old. It's only much later when I spoke to my, when I was, as an adult, I would have conversations with my mother about her experience of it. My, my aunts, my uncles, I never heard them speak about it. I would say, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The Japanese attitude to the atomic bomb was to say, look, I mean, it happened. Let's move on. Yeah. And there's a surprising lack of bitterness towards the people who dropped the bombs on Japan. In fact, you know, people say it was this kind of, they call it like a honeymoon occupation. The Japanese and the Americans seem to embrace each other in the years after the Second World War. And the Americans, you know, poured huge amounts of money into Japan to build a powerful ally against the huge kind of communist block of the world in China and the Soviet Union. And so very rapidly. I think memories of the war and the atomic bomb were left behind. So, you know, I haven't actually, you know, so the bomb hasn't actually in Nagasaki or the fact that I came from Nagasaki doesn't kind of loom over me in anything like the way that I, you know, people with a Jewish background, people who are Jewish have the Holocaust haunting them. through the generations. You know, I know many Jewish people who, it's very hard for them to get away from the shadow of the Holocaust. I've never had that with the atomic bomb. It's something I gradually became aware of. And even now it feels peculiarly distant from me. Kazuo Ishiguro, speaking to Terry Gross in 2021. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. And Justin Chang reviews the new Spanish film, La Bola Negra. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. So when you came to England from Japan with your parents, because your father had a job that was supposed to be temporary as a researcher, you moved to, I think it was Guildford. And it sounds very rural. You were like five minutes away from. There was a farm, there were hedgehogs around. The milk was delivered by a horse and wagon. Yeah, that's all true, yeah. The farm was less than five minutes. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was just, it was more or less right there. So you were used to like a rebuilt city, Nagasaki, and the new technology of the time. Did you feel like you were entering like a different world and a different era? Certainly. Certainly felt like a different world. And it felt like a much quieter, less colorful world, I have to say. I mean, the children's toys were very muted and rather austere. And this was 1960. And what people in America perhaps wouldn't understand is that Britain had gone through a period of huge austerity after the Second World War. Britain had become a very, very. Poor place. There was rationing until the 1950s. People had to present tickets to just get their portion of food. And I think that that's something very hard for people in America to understand because the 1950s were huge boom years in America. And even compared to Japan, it's like in 1960, I have to say, England felt impoverished. There wasn't a variety of. There wasn't a variety of color and toys and excitement, particularly from a child's point of view. But I really appreciated the rural countryside as it was. I mean, it wasn't real countryside, but I mean, the town more or less ended where our house was. And I grew up kind of in these English fields and English trees. And my parents' friends were kind of very, very old-fashioned English types. So you were a choir boy in church in England. Were your parents. Did your parents practice any religion in Japan? No, they were without religion. I remember at one point when I was about 15 or something, I asked, what was our religion? Because I know that in Japan, you had to have an official religion on your birth certificate. I think mainly to prove that you weren't Christian. It dates back to some era when Christians were seen as a threat. So everyone has to have an official religion. My mother had to actually go upstairs to look it up. And she said, you know what, we're Buddhists, but I'll just go and tell you what kind of Buddhists. And she came back down and said, yes, we're all Zen Buddhists. So I said, all right, we're all Zen Buddhists. But I mean, the attitude to religion was kind of like that, you know. And I would say that's fairly typical of a Japanese family, that the role of religion, obviously with some. exceptions, but by and large, you know, religion is not the same kind of thing it tends to be in the West. And most Japanese people would have a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist shrine in their homes, as was the case in the house I spent the first five years of my life in. You have them both there and you decorate them for different festivals and things like that. They don't seem to have a deeper religious identity at all. So you grew up in England, which, you know, still has a monarchy. And your new novel, Clara on the Sun, has so much to do with class structure, like a very rigid form of class structure. One of the jobs that you had when you were a young man was as a grouse beater. So I'm assuming. And this was for. Was this for the Queen Mother? It was, yeah. But that was just for one summer. But it just seems such a strange job, the idea of beating birds out of the heather so that the most privileged people in England can shoot them for sport. Yeah, but I don't think it's something unique to England by any means. Anywhere where there's any kind of, you know, game shooting, I think that's the system. What did it feel like to participate in that? It doesn't seem like your values. I just did it as a very interesting experience for four weeks in the summer. And it introduced me to, I suppose, a kind of a world I wouldn't normally see. You know, later that same year, I spent three months hitchhiking around North America. And I was sleeping in missions and things like this, or on the side of the road. So it was a year. It was a very formative year. When I went from meeting members of the British royal family and being employed by one of them to being a hitchhiker, you know, and sleeping in kind of in beds with kind of homeless people. It was very interesting. Kazuo Ishiguro speaking to Terry Gross in 2021. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. When you're hitchhiking. Across America. Did that coincide with the period when so many Americans were turning to Eastern religions, like Zen Buddhism? And as you were describing, your parents were from Japan and were, although they didn't really practice, they were officially Zen Buddhists. So I'm wondering what that period was like for you. There was quite a lot of that, actually. There was a lot of that in America. To an extent, I had never experienced living in England. And particularly because I was actually, I was on the West Coast a lot of the time. You know, I was hitchhiking on Highway 1. And so particularly in California, and I remember places like Berkeley, where I spent a few days, you know. I mean, there seemed to be every kind of variation of some kind of guru worship or some kind of method. Or some kind of alternative quasi-religion being offered every few steps as you went down Telegraph Avenue or something. Somebody will be waiting to accost you with some leaflets and trying to recruit you to something. So for me, it was quite exciting. I learned a lot from that trip. But I'll say the other thing I actually realized then, perhaps for the first time, was that although there were a lot of people doing what I was doing back then, hitchhiking. You know, we kind of. Long hair and rucksacks. Actually, there were two very distinct groups. There were people like me, middle-class kids, who were doing this to kind of widen their experience and broaden their romantic vision of life. And there were people who were already by then, at the age of 19, 20. They were, you know, they were running away from things. Their world was just collapsing. And, you know, there were just people. People running away from horrible situations. And it took me a while to actually come to terms with this. You know, I wanted to think that everyone was having a great time like me. When you were on the road during the period when so many people were looking at Eastern religions, were you seen as somebody who could be closer to that because you were Japanese, your family was from Japan? You know, even though they didn't practice and Buddhism was their official religion. Were you seen as somebody who could, you know, be more enlightened as a result? Not especially. But I think if I wanted to play on that, I could, you know. I mean, you know, if I just, you know, because what happened, what would happen is that, you know, you'd hitchhike into some town, into a city, you know, San Diego, you know, Berkeley or wherever. And very rapidly, you'd learn that there was a place somewhere in that city. Where a lot of young people were just gathered. And so in the way that I suppose many people are very highly aware of now, you would actually kind of create a sort of persona for yourself. And you just kind of join in and sit down and, you know, this will be your circle for the next two days or three days. And you can experiment with your identity in the way that I guess a lot of people do with social media now. And in that sense, I suppose, kind of being a kind of a long haired Japanese guy with an English accent, with a rucksack and a guitar. You know, if I wanted to play up that kind of mystical side, I mean, I could. But I wasn't a big person for things like Zen and things like that, you know. When you were on the road creating different, like trying on different personas and trying to figure out who you were, who you wanted to be, what were some of the things that you tried that, you know, that you largely abandoned but maybe kept part of? I was then wanting to be a singer-songwriter. And that's why, cumbersome as it was, I mean, you try hitchhiking with a guitar, you know, an acoustic guitar, it's a really clumsy thing to carry around with. And actually somebody stole it one month into this trip in San Francisco. And I was really relieved, you know. But yeah, I was trying to be this singer-songwriter and I, you know, I thought I would get discovered, you know, sooner or later while hitchhiking around America. I don't know why I thought that, but I, but in those days. Like a lot of English people, we thought San Francisco was where all these wonderful things happened. And so, yeah, I wasn't trying to, I never tried to pass myself off as some sort of wise Zen kind of figure from the East. I was trying to pretend that I, you know, I was this genius, undiscovered singer-songwriter. And that was something that I had to let go fairly soon because of the limitations of my ability. But I think that was actually very important to me in, in when, when I took up writing and many of the things I do still to this day as a writer, as an, as a, as a novelist, I think it has its foundations in what I discovered in the, in the kind of place that I arrived at as a writer of songs. Can you give us a sense of the kind of songs that you were writing? Back when your aspiration was to be a singer-songwriter, if you were willing, and this might be asking too much, if you were willing to sing for a living or not? I'm not going to do that. No, I mean. Okay. I was always a pretty competent musician. I still am. You know, I can, I can play the guitar pretty well. And so, you know, like, like a lot of people when I was 15 or so, I was writing these kind of intensely autobiographical songs. You know, real kind of, you know, intense bedroom kind of angst songs, you know, which would, which would be, sound a little bit like Bennecone or something. But then I went through this kind of, probably the equivalent of what I see a lot of writers when they're starting out doing this. I went through a kind of a period when I was just flexing my technical muscles. And so I went through a kind of purple prose, kind of James Joyce period. Or more like kind of Kerouac-Ginsburg period, you know. And by the time I, I, I was finishing my songwriting career, which had no material success. I was writing very, very pared down songs. You know, I could play all these chords. I could do quite fancy things. I decided I would just bring it right, right down to something very simple and minimal. And I was trying to tell little stories in just a few minutes. Which meant that you had to put a lot of the meaning between the lines. As I say, I mean, that, that kind of became my style. And this is why, I mean, to this day, a novel for me is always a certain kind of a first-person narrative. It's kind of like, I'm still this, this guy with an acoustic guitar in a, in a kind of a shabby room, darkened room with about 30 people listening to, listening to me. That's the kind of atmosphere I always try and create. You know? In church, when you were a child, you were the lead choir boy. Do I have the language right? And so you must have had, like, a really good voice then. Did you want to change the kind of voice that you had? I mean, obviously your voice changes when you become, when you start to become a man. But, like, was there a sweetness in your voice that you didn't want? You know, that you had when you were a boy in church that you didn't want? As a. A singer-songwriter? Did you want to have a more, like, I've lived, I've lived life kind of voice? Absolutely. Absolutely. No, the, when, before my voice broke, by all accounts, you know, I had this beautiful, angelic voice. And so I had a kind of local fame. I would sing solos at the church choir and also at the school choir, you know. And, and people knew me as this, as this little Japanese boy who could, who could, you know, sing these kind of. Christian anthems and, you know, these things kind of very beautifully, the solo passages. When my voice broke, I couldn't sing at all. That, that, I can still hold the tune very well. But, I mean, I think it's also because of what, what you said. I was, I was trying to, yeah, sound like Robert Johnson or something. I don't know what I was trying to do. I would sound like Bob Dylan or sound like Bob Dylan or something. I don't know, which is absurd, you know. And so, but, but to this day. This business about voice is very important. I mean, you know, when I'm writing, the actual voice of the narrator is very important. And I find, I take, you know, enormous inspiration as a, oddly, you know, as a writer of fiction from listening to singing voices. Yeah, so, so I love to listen to, to, to, to Stacey Kent, who I write lyrics for. And many other singers. I mean, there's something almost impossible to capture in words. About the quality of a singing performance. Kazuo Ishiguro, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you, Terry. It's a great honor to speak to you. Kazuo Ishiguro, speaking with Terry Gross last year. His novel, Clara and the Sun, has been adapted into a new film. Here's a song for which he wrote the lyrics. It's called, I Wish I Could Go Traveling Again, sung by Stacey Kent. I wish I could go traveling again. It feels like this summer will never end. And I've had such good offers from several of my friends. I want to sit in my shade, sipping my latte. Beneath the yawning of a famous cafe. Jet lagged and with our luggage gone astray. I want a waiter to give us a reprimand. In a language neither of us understand. While we argue about the customs of the land. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new movie from Spain, La Bola Negra. This is Fresh Air. The new Spanish drama, La Bola Negra, tells three interwoven stories spanning almost a century about gay men living through times of fascism and freedom. It won a directing prize at Cannes. It won for the filmmakers Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo and is Spain's Oscar submission for Best International Feature. It's now playing in theaters and begins streaming on Netflix December 2nd. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. There's an awful lot of movie in La Bola Negra. The new film from the directors Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo, who are known as Los Javis. They've made a sprawling literary historical epic of gay male design. It's a film about a man who's a man of his word. One that toggles between the repressive, war-ravaged 1930s and the more liberated present day. It's easy to see why the film has been passionately embraced, even if it falls far short of its maximalist ambitions. This is a movie of big, sweeping, often clumsy gestures, full of bloody conflict, outsized melodrama, and sexual encounters that run the gamut from a forbidden caress to a grinder hookup. In denouncing the film, Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo, the fascism of the closet, it seeks to be a queer cinema monument for the ages. The directors, who co-wrote the script with the playwright Alberto Conejero, cut relentlessly among three stories about three gay men living in three different time frames. The film begins in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. After Italian planes bomb a small village, a young trumpet player named Sebastián, played by the musician Guittari, makes a harrowing escape. He survives by joining the right-wing nationalist army, which is how he meets Rafael, a young freedom fighter who's been wounded and taken prisoner. Sebastián is ordered to watch over him, which is hardly the worst of assignments. Rafael, played by Miguel Bernardo, is exceedingly handsome, and despite their mutual wariness, Sebastián feels unmistakable stirrings of desire. Another of the three stories takes place in Granada in 1932. Kifes plays Carlos, a young man from a rich family, who's trying to become a member of an exclusive casino. But due to suspicions of his homosexuality, he's rejected, or blackballed. La Bola Negra is Spanish for The Black Ball. It's also the title of an unfinished play by the great Federico Garcia Lorca, a detail that will come into focus later. Carlos, who's pressured by his father to return to the casino and deny the rumors, goes out and vents his frustrations at a bar. There he joins a crowd of dancers in a flamenco-style number. The third story is set in 2017. Carlos Gonzalez plays Alberto, a Madrid-based historian who enjoys the kind of casual sexual freedom that the 1930s protagonists could never dream of. One day, Alberto receives word that his maternal grandfather, whom he never knew, has died and left him a mysterious inheritance. The nature of that inheritance leads Alberto to conduct his own research into Lorca's life and death. Lorca was murdered by nationalist forces in 1936, and some believe that he was targeted for his homosexuality. His artistic and political legacy becomes the tissue that connects all three stories. Many have noted that, with its intricate three-part structure and its celebration of a queer literary icon, the film owes a debt to The Hours, which won Nicole Kidman an Oscar for her performance as Virginia Woolf. You could see La Bola Negra as an homage to that film and other arthouse classics, something that directors Ambrosio and Calvo signal by casting the film as the first film to be released. The film is also the first film to be released by casting a few veteran actors in diva-like cameos. Penelope Cruz steals her every scene as a cabaret singer who dazzles the troops and provides some crucial guidance for Sebastián. And it's always a delight to see Glenn Close, even if she's been saddled with a drearily written role as an earnest Lorca scholar. Lola Dueña strikes one of the film's few genuine chords of emotion as Alberto's mother, who resents his questions about the grandfather he loved. Lola Dueña's mother, who resents his questions about the grandfather he loved, never knew. With the exception of González, who makes Alberto a poignantly understated presence, the other actors are somewhat anemic by comparison. The film's most substantial story is the 1937 one, but Guitárica de la Fuente, despite his strikingly offbeat screen presence, isn't a skilled enough actor yet to hold the narrative center. It doesn't help that because of their incessantly time-hopping structure, Ambrosio and Calvo, are almost always looking away from their characters and their stories, just as they're starting to get interesting. This kind of showy cross-cutting is a tough thing to structure an entire movie around, and here it merely hammers home an already obvious point, that the past and the present are deeply connected. In its final half-hour, La Bola Negra makes what I think is meant to be a bold leap into poetic abstraction, but what it really amounts to is just a little bit of a leap into poetic abstraction. It's just another narrative thread to cut away to. Call it story number 3B. In doing so, a film that aspires to be a monument instead becomes monumentally tedious. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new Spanish film La Bola Negra, now in theaters and streaming on Netflix in December. On Monday's show, John Turturro talks about what he learned researching his new film, how his grandmother's botched abortion before abortion was legal orphaned his mother and her siblings, and how he became the legal guardian of his brother, who had paranoid schizophrenia. Hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash thisisfreshair. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts, and iconic interviews from the archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Charlie Kyer. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Our social media video producer is Hilary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancullo.