In the hands of great filmmakers, a documentary can render something that your sensibilities might willfully ignore — even condemn. Such is the rub you may find yourself in with iconoclastic Spanish director Albert Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude,” his first nonfiction film, an unflinching gaze at bullfighting, its hushed, ornate rituals and gruesome realities.
Whether you consider the corrida a cultural tradition worthy of specialized protection or a blood sport long overdue for the dustbin of cruel spectacles, there’s no denying its ghastly singularity as an immutable confrontation of human and beast. That’s the arena in which Serra, no stranger to a cinema thick with an air of finality, has trained his patient, eerily respectful camera, specifically following Peruvian star matador Andrés Roca Rey across a stretch of competitions.
We witness reverent preparation, much ceremony and more blood than any slasher film, and eventually absorb the unmistakable sense that this macho performative world exists almost defiantly against anyone’s notion of “progress.” Just don’t expect anything about this elemental contest to be explained to you, or even contextualized. As shameful as you may find bullfighting, the details are what drive this spellbinding, immersive work.
Serra is a committed minimalist with a penchant for long takes and it makes him an unusually observant, artfully focused documentarian. His last film was the willfully obtuse 2022 French Polynesian political thriller “Pacifiction,” which more often oozed colonial malaise through its painterly landscapes than any narrative. Before that, Serra could most often be found mining France’s centuries past for mordant tableau vivants of corporeal concern, most notably in his protracted bedchamber drama “The Death of Louis XIV.”
All of which makes “Afternoons of Solitude” — despite its reflective-sounding title — practically an action film for Serra, whenever longtime cinematographer Artur Tort’s camera captures the business of the bullring. Wide views and environmental color are forsaken for a zeroed-in framing that tracks both the bull’s grim gladiatorial journey from roving combatant to ritually stabbed, gradually defeated warrior, and Rey’s role as foppish, face-contorting maestro with his flourishes of the muleta and theatrical stances.
The danger is palpable. In a couple of instances, Rey barely escapes crippling injury. But just as tangible, almost pervasive, is the horror of a majestic creature’s inescapable destiny, turned into a florid choreography of dominance. (To some extent, it only ever feels like an unfair showdown.) In the fight sequences, Serra rarely cuts away from an opportunity to watch the light leave a bull’s eyes after the death stab, a moment that invariably feels merciful. That truth alone is what keeps the movie’s viewpoint about the brutality at the heart of bullfighting breathtakingly honest.
There are only two other locations. A fixed camera inside Rey’s van captures this baby-faced legend at his most quiet and contemplative, while his team, a testosterone-fueled posse, judiciously pepper him with supportive exclamations (“What you did causes envy in the mediocre!”), wellness checks and analytical comments. In his luxury hotel room, packing Rey’s lithe frame into the layers of his intricately embroidered torero costume is a two-person operation, while unoccupied moments can spur a quick sign of the cross or a kissing of rosary beads. The general takeaway is of someone with an abiding seriousness, as if this were a sacred calling, not a profession. Then again, to repeatedly survive facing off a bleeding beast, how could one think of it as just a job?
Rey’s relationship to the spiritual side of bullfighting becomes ongoing. The movie’s title is plural, after all. For his horned opponents, one chosen afternoon — presented as entertainment — is violent and finite. In its graceful intertwining of meditation and obscenity, “Afternoons of Solitude” gives an ancient, controversial tradition the chance to shock and awe without hype or favor. It’s inhumane, it’s human and it’s a hell of a film.
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