As an American with low squeamish tolerance, I can’t say that Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary about bullfighting in uncensored glory, was a comfort watch. The obvious: bulls are killed on screen. The second obvious: I cried a lot when the first death happened. Less obvious: I was shocked when I heard an audience member gasp at a scene where a bull makes contact with the film’s star, Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey, throwing his body against the arena wall. Hold on – weren’t we on the bull’s side?
There are no delineated sides to take in Serra’s latest feature, and any partiality may be part of our upbringing (me, a weakling; Serra, a Catalan-born director who has grown up watching bullfighting). Afternoons of Solitude barely looks like a documentary, as it shares no recognizable features of your average biopic or curtain-pulling facts. It’s a glorious stage of nonfiction drama between a bull, who is destined to die in the arena, and the bullfighter, who must make its death a spectacle. But if we think of Tsai Ming-liang’s line of work as the soft, non-communicative end of slo-mo cinema, Serra’s at the other end where action speaks in strength and vigor.
The film is maybe made up of cameras stashed in three or four different locations. Most of the screen time is directed in the arena, mostly focused in close proximity to Roca Rey and the bulls. The next location we spend the most time is inside a traveling van where Roca Rey and his cuadrilla (a posse of other fighters tasked with different stages of a bullfight) are either having a pregame conversation or a post-game analysis on what could improve). Roca Rey, who shares a bushy-eyed wildness akin to Emilio Estevez’s boyish-hunk era and speaks with a hint of shyness, is not quite the character you’d imagine to willingly stare down an aggressive animal.
In between the fights, we see Roca Rey suiting up in his matador outfits, which seems to welcome glamorous production in its sequined shoulder pads, hot pink socks, and undergarments that are tight to the tendons. This is not to downplay a perceived masculinity of the sport. In fact, it’s impressive to bring a kind of black-tie affair to a sporting event that ends in life or death (and yes, you will see me in basketball shorts if I was forced to be a gladiator).
In each fight, members of the cuadrilla are responsible for piercing the bull with lances and sharp sticks, using the blood loss as an advantage in Roca Rey’s favor when he finally faces the bull in the end. From my summation of the fights, Roca Rey’s showmanship comes in when he is able to exhaust the bull into acting submission, dancing close to death itself. He also doesn’t slack in posture: chest is puffed, head is held high, and his legs twinkle in the sand. Roca Rey moves in a way that is most likely explainable by experts, but only I can word as a serious rooster who can somehow purse its beak in concentration.
As mentioned before, Afternoons of Solitude doesn’t intend to swing one way or another when addressing the treatment of bulls or the glorification of bullfighters and simply presents as they go. I’d think it’s fair to say that Serra is fascinated by the sport enough to capture Roca Rey’s fights without turning away. I also think there is special attention to the bulls’ involuntary sacrifice to a centuries-old tradition when he lets the camera linger on their faces in their last dying breaths (sometimes slowed in rasps or quickened by a blade to the neck). Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort (where they also collaborated in 2022’s Pacification) are able to elevate the scenes so that we are not just bystanders in the bleachers. There is art in the kill and purpose in the death – a dance I hope not to see soon.
Afternoons of Solitude
2024
dir. Albert Serra
125 mins
