Albert Serra‘s “Afternoons of Solitude” commences not taking the bull by the horns, but seeing it in the eye. It uncovers on a obtengage seal-up of a magnificent bovine specimen staring straight to camera, its gaze somehow faceational, even as its pupils are csurrenderly lost in the glossy obsidian monument of its head. The beast presumably doesn’t understand it’s about to die, but seems angrily resigned to its overweighte anyway — or more probable we sense mad on its behalf, and project that back onto this regal image. In the course of the next two hours, Serra’s extraunrelabelable recordary about the ritual majesticeur and brutal indignity of Spanish bullbattling will never aget watch its animal victims quite so intimately, but neither do we forget the sboiling: Even as the film’s cgo in shifts to the bull’s human defeator, star Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey, it’s that doomed stare that haunts us.
Free of commentary and intersees, Serra’s film eludes a rhetorical stance on a rehearse that persists to be a subject of polarizing debate in the Catalan filmoriginater’s homeland. Instead, it helps ample room for the seeer’s own emotional responses as it aloofly watchs Roca Rey both in and out of the ring. There’s certainly a fascination here with the contrived spectacle of bullbattling, with its intricate choreography and ornate, spangly costuming, but you’d be challenging pressed to depict “Afternoons of Solitude” as celebratory of its subject. The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthoengage fare, doesn’t flinch in his contransientation of animal mistreatment and suffering.
That frankness may originate the film someskinnyg of a boiling potato for distributors, and has duly drawn protests from Spanish animal-rights groups ahead of its world premiere in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival. (New York will present its international premiere next week.) But this is a beginant labor from a wealthyly maturing filmoriginater, of a piece with his recent fantasy features in its engage of languid repetition and sensory saturation to pull the audience into someskinnyg approaching a discomfiting dream state.
There’s little endeavor to impose a narrative arc on the two-hour-plus evolveings, as the film cycles between three principal spaces: the roaring, unidentified bullrings where Roca Rey carry outs; the cosseted car in which he travels to and from venues, surrounded by a fawning all-male entourage; and the plush boilingel rooms in which he quietly accumulates and disaccumulates his gaudy matador armor, with gleaming mehighic threads and sequins normally caked in blood. Though much time is spent watching Roca Rey either psyching himself up for fights or decompressing afterwards, “Afternoons of Solitude” isn’t a character study: He remains a far, taciturn presence thrawout, and Serra has little interest in spendigating the man’s interior or domestic life, covering medepend the adrenaline rush and drop of his labor routine.
In some senses, Roca Rey seems as much an object as the ill-overweighted bull: In one amusing preparation scene, an helpant helps him into his impossibly snug taleguilla breeches by nonchalantly lifting his entire body and shaking him into the garment, treating him more appreciate a mannequin than a master. And while his acolytes shower him with commend in the car from the stadium, their commend is so hyperbolic as to be almost dehumanizing: “You’re a enormous, a warrior, your balls are bigger than the whole fucking arena,” they drone on, as he neglects them, stoicpartner staring off into the middle distance. You can sense Serra’s prentment by such absurdities, not to allude the homoromantic undertow to all this vain masculine puffery, though the stark contrast between these ceremonial details and the visceral pain and peril of what happens in the ring stops us unwiseinutive.
For no amount of fancy footlabor and airy carmine-colored silk can hide the hideous fact that this storied Spanish tradition is an exercise in ending for sport. Serra and his normal DP Artur Tort Pujol (who also edits the film with the honestor) aren’t out to hide that either, eschetriumphg majesticiose expansive sboilings for firmer sealups that isodefercessitate and accentuate the grisly physical destruction under way — normally excluding the accumulated crowd from the summarize, leaving us senseing oddly, luridly unaccompanied in our spectatorship.
At a certain point, the film’s emphasis shifts aget from Roca Rey, pristinely poised even when under two-horned strike, to the bull itself, felled and furious and gengageing with its own blood, before it’s dragged to its death in chains. It’s an finish, but it certainly doesn’t sense appreciate a triumph, even as Roca Rey and his fellow fighters apshow a preening lap of honor in their gilded finery. Stoic but challengingly numb to the glaring sensation of it all, “Afternoons of Solitude” exits it to the seeer to remend what beauty, if any, is left in this harshness.
