‘Afternoons Of Solitude’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Albert Serra. Spain/France/Portugal 2024. 125mins

Afternoons Of Solitude is a wildly romantic title for a documentary about bullfighting, an exercise described by somebody as “the entrance line of the soul”. However watching Albert Serra’s movie, you marvel who’s extra alone within the ring – the torero pushing his talent to the restrict, or the bull going through sure dying. Specializing in Peruvian-born bullring star Andrés Roca Rey, Afternoons Of Solitude marks a departure for Catalan director Serra, whose earlier options (most not too long ago, Pacifiction) have been dramas, however whose movies as a gallery artist set the tone for this distinctive, confrontational work.

A deeply immersive work and an unashamedly repetitive one

The sheer quantity of animal struggling proven might make this San Sebastian competitors title, which may also play New York Movie Competition, as powerful a promote as it’s a watch. But its immersive depth makes it important viewing for Serra followers, and for anybody concerned about documentary’s means to document, and make us take into consideration, the extremes of the actual world.

Afternoons comprises neither commentary nor interviews, and divulges subsequent to nothing about Roca’s character or his life outdoors his work: in that sense, it’s an existential image of a person whose skilled persona is his very being. Roca is on display all through – apart from an intro by which a black bull gazes on the digicam, a suggestion that the movie’s actual protagonist may not be the person within the go well with of lights.

A strand working all through reveals Roca and his workforce travelling by automotive between venues, earlier than or after fights. Early on, we see him in his resort room peeling off his regalia to disclose a blood-soaked shirt; later, an assistant helps match him into his tight trousers by lifting him bodily. That is, certainly, a distinctly homoerotic movie in its concentrate on the willowy fighter’s bodily magnificence, to not point out the scenes by which his male entourage of dazzlingly-attired picadors and bandilleros bathe him with exorbitant reward (“You have got massive balls”, “Superhuman!”) like a pop star or princeling. 

Ritual equally performs out within the combat itself, with the bull led regularly to its dying by a time-honoured succession of taunts, parries and jabs, then completed off by the sword. Roca’s actions are as formalised as a ballet dancer’s, all the way down to his repertoire of fierce appears to be like – a human emulation of untamed animality. 

Serra and his digicam workforce, below DoP Artur Tort Pujol – who additionally co-edits with Serra – usually are available in very shut on Roca, isolating him in a approach not dissimilar to a different artists’ documentary tackle sport, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane (2006). In addition they isolate particulars within the ring: the bull’s hooves or its head thrusting in opposition to the picador’s horse. Key to the movie is its opposition of nature and artifice: on one stage, the soiled actuality of bovine blood and gushing snot versus the aesthetic great thing about the toreros’ clothes; on one other, the immediacy of animal intuition versus the codified language of the fighter’s strikes.

With its prolonged combat sequences, it is a deeply immersive work and an unashamedly repetitive one, the repetition highlighting the ritual. Additionally it is one which plunges us into unalloyed horror as we witness the animals’ ache. The the Aristocracy and daring celebrated in corrida mythology seem in a brand new mild after we realise how a lot the bull is outnumbered by its human opponents. The movie makes no overt remark, and could possibly be accused of indulging the spectacle of blood sport – however it’s laborious to not see implicit critique, particularly when the digicam lingers on a bull’s torn again or its staring eyes throughout its dying throes. However there may be little or no directorial rhetoric to cue our responses, besides often for Marc Verdaguer’s ominous music, and the closing use of a really distorted passage of Saint-Saëns (different music contains Jefferson Airplane’s cod-flamenco ‘Embryonic Journey’). 

We study little about Rocas himself, nor concerning the bullfighting world, its social construction or economics. However, for all its concentrate on the bravado, the glamour and the glittering wardrobe, Afternoons Of Solitude is a world away from the myth-making of traditional bullfight films by Rouben Mamoulian, Budd Boetticher and others. Serra’s movie is not only about blood and sand, however sweat, terror and agony too.