Afternoons of Solitude: Albert Serra’s immersive encapsulation of matador life

• Reviewed from the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. 

Red is the warmest colour in Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), an impressionistic and intimate documentary featuring Peruvian wunderkind torero Andrés Roca Rey which is effectively A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bullfighter.

The subtly modulated hues which distinguished Serra’s Tahiti-set drama Pacifiction (2022) – a symphony in deliquescent pastels – are again here in evidence. The eye-catching splashes of carmine include the blood of the beasts with which Roca Rey engages in lethal pas de deux.

Afternoons of Solitude has obvious similarities with films and TV shows offering behind-the-scenes access to fabled sporting figures, though Roca Rey and his fellow toreros are only partly athletes. As aficionados love to point out, bullfighting reports in Spain are to be found in newspapers’ culture pages, alongside reviews of plays and films.

Widely derided as a spectacle of atavistic barbarism, bullfighting is for its admirers a traditional form of performance art which demands the physical agility and grace of dance. The prowess in such areas of Roca Rey, who has been dubbed the Lionel Messi of his profession, provides Afternoons of Solitude with its most electric sequences.

Editing with cinematographer Artur Tort, Serra presents extracts from 14 bullfights in four Spanish arenas, always in medium-shot. We never see a whole arena; the crowds therein, while decidedly audible, are only very briefly glimpsed – the public a kind of vast, fickle, faceless organism, whose desire for satisfaction must always be considered and appeased.

During the bullfight sequences the focus is very much on Roca Rey’s bodily and facial contortions as he confronts his stamping, snorting foe. With sneering grimace, blazingly concentrated eyes, and much haughty head-tossing, he enacts the approved and required gestures while incorporating distinctive touches of his own.

Roca Rey’s exaggerations are designed to appeal to the most distant spectators, and throughout he is advised and encouraged by nearby members of his entourage (“chest out! like the greats, with poise”). Indeed, the film’s title applies much more to the bulls than it does to their opponent, for whom the element of teamwork is crucial. In the filmmaking too; Serra reunites with several key collaborators here – as with Pacifiction, Gadiel Bendelac deserves a particular ¡ole! for his colour-correction talents.

The arena scenes alternate with more visually straightforward sequences shot in Roca Rey’s minibus – the seats, like his towels and cape, bear his RR monogram – using a small, static camera positioned directly in front of the young star. As Roca Rey and his entourage (“cuadrilla”) travel to and from the arenas, the men near-incessantly shower him with praise – often variations on “You showed a huge pair of balls” – whose sincerity may be tempered by the fact that all are obviously in his paid employ.

It’s telling that the cuadrillero who seems closest to Rocas Rey is his assistant/dresser (officially ‘mozo de espadas’) Manuel ‘Larita’ Lara, with whom he exchanges barely a word. A delightfully inexpressive, hangdog fellow, Larita – who has worked for Roca Rey since the latter was a teenager – is, during the picture’s most entertaining sequence, seen literally hoisting his boss into his ornately-decorated pants (‘taleguilla’) in an opulent room at the Madrid Ritz. Amid such preparations, Roca Rey is piously careful to fulfil ritual self-blessings, involving a framed image of the weeping Virgin.

Afternoons of Solitude effectively contrasts the engaging theatrical intensity of Roca Rey in the arena with his low-key personality beyond; he does not come across as the most charismatic of individuals in regular life. Ironically, in the case of Serra himself for most of his career, the reverse was the case: his puckishly provocative statements in interviews (“I hate all British cinema,” he told Sight and Sound in 2015) and self-glorifying public pronouncements tended to have considerably more spark than his ponderous films.

Belatedly and unexpectedly, Serra made a considerable leap forward in every regard with Pacifiction, which attracted attention and acclaim far beyond his previous coterie of admirers. This latest enterprise sees him confidently refining his own personal style, embellishing the familiar fly-on-the-wall format with an array of visual and aural flourishes that combine to produce perhaps the most immersive encapsulation of tauromachy yet achieved in cinema.

While principally focused on a human protagonist, the animal element is prominent from the very start: the first, extended shots are of solitary bulls at night, allowing us to appreciate the rhythmical force of their breathing and the sable sheen of their coats. Of the six bulls killed across Afternoons of Solitude’s two hours, four are given the relative dignity of close-ups as they expire and then are dragged from the arena by their horns. Reminders that, while for Roca Rey and company bullfighting is a matter of life and death, for the bulls it’s only a matter of death.