Director: Albert Serra
For some unconscionable reason it’s taken two years for Albert Serra’s bullfighter profile doc Afternoons of Solitude to land a home here in the UK, but it’s finally touched down – however temporarily – on MUBI this week. While the subject matter may be far from the minds of most UK residents, Serra’s credentials make this an immediate must-see, and the film itself is as transfixing as it is troubling. Caught with exemplary focus, it is both fascinating and opaque; a repetitious depiction of a kind of hell that’s impossible to look away from, though you’ll likely want to over and over again.
Andrés Roca Rey is a star of the spurious ‘sport’ who has garnered a following for his poise, daring and luck in the bullfighting ring. The man himself is left, in a sense, as a kind of enigma. Serra studies but does not interject. Rey is not interviewed and gives nothing to the camera, save for a few furtive glances as he’s driven to and from arenas. Yet through Serra’s inscrutable observations of him in candid moments – either in hotel rooms or in the grotesquely magnetic environment of his profession – cracks in that mysterious facade reveal themselves.
The environment he has chosen for himself is predicated on an intense masculine bravado. When he is successful, his entourage shower him with platitudes, and most of these revolve around what balls he has. Balls, always balls. His triumphs are always testicular. In the ring, against tormented, confused and badly wounded animals, his posture is a markedly arched back, an intense scowl and pout. In preparation, however, with body stockings, crucifix necklace and attendants helping him into elaborate garments, he looks feminine. And when he exits their communal vehicle, his entourage switch, on a dime, from their sycophantic praise to chiding criticisms of his performance.
Small moments bely Rey’s suspicion that he’s predicating on luck that has to run out. In spite of such chinks in his confidence, once a bull is bested, he’ll still strut, demanding the respect and praise of the audience. One wonders their psychology in this strange arena. One ‘victory’ is celebrated with a cry of “Life is worth nothing!”. Such a philosophy intersects so bizarrely with a form of mass entertainment. It’s hard to parse the complex motivations in the presence of such absolute cruelty. When the ‘fight’ goes wrong, there’s a madness to Rey’s perseverance, and not a small amount of schadenfreude. The poor bull, however, is just impulse and confusion. And the audience? Do they love and admire Rey, or are they waiting for him to fail?
Serra keeps us limited to just hotel rooms, transport and the bullfighting ring itself. The matches are captured in long, long takes. It’s slow. Tense. There’s a lot of waiting. Strutting. Posturing. And the adherence to inexplicable traditions and codes that are left unknown and unknowable to the uninitiated. The bulls’ backs are poked with wounds, drenched in their own blood. Though the animals are indifferent, scared and angry, the air of a grudge match is evoked by Rey. We watch a good number of them being mutilated and killed. It’s vile but hypnotic. Another day sees the show take place during a downpour. Pensive. Dully procedural. A man in the audience cradles his head in his hands. On another occasion Rey’s confidence seems rattled. “Everyone’s on board?” he asks after one fight, referring to the crowd with skepticism.
Music is applied sparingly, but leaves an editorial significance. At the film’s opening Rey enters a room in his bloodied regalia so casually it’s disarming. Marc Verdaguer’s music carries with it such a sense of trouble, echoing some of Angelo Badalamenti’s signature moves to conjure disquiet. This same sense of unease recurs at the end of the picture as Rey exits an arena following another of his successes on the tour. We return to black and the blood red of the credits, but we’re taken there on a forlorn bed of uncertainty and ennui, having witnessed an insular world of mad violence that seems completely detached from the rational.
What are the gains here? What fuels the satisfaction in the public slaughter? How does that tally with the dressage and pomp of the spectacle? Serra offers no easy answers. Afternoons of Solitude is as grim and pessimistic-feeling a document as I’ve watched all year, but there’s something magnetic and compelling in its baffled nihilism. Steel yourself if you’re inclined to watch it; a tough time is ahead. But one riddled with complexities and contradictions and caught with incendiary poise to match Serra’s puzzling subject. One of the great modern documentaries.
The Lost Highway Hotel 