For better or worse, I am curious about the heinous constructions of this world: aberrations turned into rituals, cultures of bloodlust. Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), his new bullfighting documentary, resists both indictment and apologia. Instead, the film operates with an anthropologist’s curiosity, magnetized towards the irrational, the death-driven, and the undiluted expenditure of mortals sprinting headfirst into their graves. Serra shoots bullfights in medium shots and close-ups, focusing only on his two battling subjects. The crowd remains invisible, present only as an audible chorus of cheers and exclamations. In tauromachy, bull and matador meet in the arena, locked-in for a death duel. Yet Afternoons of Solitude grasps the folly of a reductive parallel between Man and Beast. When Peruvian celebrity-matador Andrés Roca Rey (Serra’s subject) finishes a slaughter, he travels home in a limousine and retires to a lavish hotel. His livelihood stems from some self-annihilating, Freudian-Bataillean crusade. Meanwhile, the bull has no will. Its participancy is a byproduct of captivity.
Roca Rey is regularly mauled in fights, almost to the point of severe injury. In the shaken aftermath, he stammers on about the miracle of his survival and the flimsiness of luck. He’s met with pacifictions (Serra pun intended) from a circle of yes-men. Roca Rey’s reflections are jarring turns of logic from a man celebrated for his irrationality. While Afternoons of Solitude is full of near-death encounters, the most intimate shots are domestic: Roca Rey’s dressing and undressing. Alone with Serra’s camera, he meticulously tucks his penis into translucent tights. Soon after, he floats limp in the air as his squire hoists him into suffocatingly tight pants. The matador dresses in the traje de luces (“suit of lights”): a flamboyantly sequined, multi-layered costume. Its style is 18th century extravagance, unadulterated by modern fashion conventions. The traje de luces is a microcosm for the anachronistic tensions of bullfighting: a modernity bound by ancient practice.
Though Serra eschews didacticism, nothing is whitewashed. He lingers on homosocial interactions full of phallocentric plaudits. Roca Rey and his legions of men spit at each bull with seething hate: a mammal projected as all things evil. Its death is somehow both quotidian and a blessing; in one heartbreaking shot, a pair of pristine white ADIDAS shoes lug away its mutilated carcass. In the Eighth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke posits that, as humans perceiving the world, “we know what is really out there only from the animal’s gaze.” Afternoons’ opening scene counteracts its characters’ anthropocentrism, adopting this animal gaze. A wild bull roams a dark night, rapt in its own solitude. The woods are far detached from the arenas of bloodsport. For a few moments, we inhabit its perspective. Then, the bull peers into the camera until its stillness is interrupted by a sudden graphic match to Roca Rey, staring forward with an identical gaze.
Whereas Ernest Hemingway claimed “bullfighting is not sport – it is tragedy,” Serra’s depiction veers away from the moral plane of tragedy. Rather, bullfighting is a sadistic theatre. The slaughter of a bull is slow. Matadors must be pragmatic, yet also theatrical. Roca Rey is a killer and performer, virtuoso as both. In the arena, he scowls at his opponent and flaunts a puffing pantomime, convex spine posturing body-first, head-back. Though this is Serra’s first documentary, Roca Rey is an easy adjustment to non-fiction since he becomes an actor during combat. Yet outside the bullring, he’s small and laconic. Serra films him in the limo rides home, silent with bulging, unknowable eyes and a moviestar’s visage. In unfortunate truth, he’s a figure ripe for spectatorship: an enigma and an emblem of the mythos of destruction.
