‘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 activity described by someone as “the front line of the soul”. But watching Albert Serra’s film, you wonder who is more alone in the ring – the torero pushing his skill to the limit, or the bull facing certain death. Focusing on Peruvian-born bullring star Andrés Roca Rey, Afternoons Of Solitude marks a departure for Catalan director Serra, whose previous features (most recently, Pacifiction) have been dramas, but whose films as a gallery artist set the tone for this distinctive, confrontational work.

A deeply immersive work and an unashamedly repetitive one

The sheer amount of animal suffering shown may make this San Sebastian competition title, which will also play New York Film Festival, as tough a sell as it is a watch. Yet its immersive intensity makes it essential viewing for Serra followers, and for anyone interested in documentary’s ability to record, and make us think about, the extremes of the real world.

Afternoons contains neither commentary nor interviews, and reveals next to nothing about Roca’s personality or his life outside his work: in that sense, it is an existential picture of a man whose professional persona is his very being. Roca is on screen throughout – except for an intro in which a black bull gazes at the camera, a suggestion that the film’s real protagonist might not be the man in the suit of lights.

A strand running throughout shows Roca and his team travelling by car between venues, before or after fights. Early on, we see him in his hotel room peeling off his regalia to reveal a blood-soaked shirt; later, an assistant helps fit him into his tight trousers by lifting him bodily. This is, indeed, a distinctly homoerotic film in its focus on the willowy fighter’s physical beauty, not to mention the scenes in which his male entourage of dazzlingly-attired picadors and bandilleros shower him with exorbitant praise (“You have big balls”, “Superhuman!”) like a pop star or princeling. 

Ritual similarly plays out in the fight itself, with the bull led gradually to its death through a time-honoured succession of taunts, parries and jabs, then finished off by the sword. Roca’s movements are as formalised as a ballet dancer’s, down to his repertoire of fierce looks – a human emulation of untamed animality. 

Serra and his camera team, under DoP Artur Tort Pujol – who also co-edits with Serra – often come in very close on Roca, isolating him in a way not dissimilar to another artists’ documentary take on sport, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane (2006). They also isolate details in the ring: the bull’s hooves or its head thrusting against the picador’s horse. Key to the film is its opposition of nature and artifice: on one level, the dirty reality of bovine blood and gushing snot versus the aesthetic beauty of the toreros’ clothing; on another, the immediacy of animal instinct versus the codified language of the fighter’s moves.

With its extended fight sequences, this is a deeply immersive work and an unashamedly repetitive one, the repetition highlighting the ritual. It is also one that plunges us into unalloyed horror as we witness the animals’ pain. The nobility and daring celebrated in corrida mythology appear in a new light when we realise how much the bull is outnumbered by its human opponents. The film makes no overt comment, and could be accused of indulging the spectacle of blood sport – but it is hard not to see implicit critique, especially when the camera lingers on a bull’s torn back or its staring eyes during its death throes. But there is very little directorial rhetoric to cue our responses, except occasionally for Marc Verdaguer’s ominous music, and the closing use of a very distorted passage of Saint-Saëns (other music includes Jefferson Airplane’s cod-flamenco ‘Embryonic Journey’). 

We learn little about Roca himself, nor about the bullfighting world, its social structure or economics. But, for all its focus on the bravado, the glamour and the glittering wardrobe, Afternoons Of Solitude is a world away from the myth-making of classic bullfight movies by Rouben Mamoulian, Budd Boetticher and others. Serra’s film is not just about blood and sand, but sweat, terror and agony too.