Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey has monumental testicles. Simply one of many largest units on Earth. We by no means see them for ourselves, however they’re all that his crew of hypemen can speak about. “Such nice balls!,” a member of Roca’s entourage insists. “Your balls are larger than the entire fucking enviornment!,” one other concurs.
The dominant topic of dialog in a documentary the place nearly nothing else is ever mentioned, the scale of Roca’s nuts is remarked upon so typically — and with such grim sobriety — all through Albert Serra’s transfixing “Afternoons of Solitude” that I began to fret if the world’s best torero might need a severe medical situation of some variety.
If he did, you actually wouldn’t find out about it right here, as Serra’s movie isn’t a lot for private particulars. The place Roca was born, why he dedicated his life to the performative slaughter of horned cattle, and what he does together with his time exterior of the bullring are only a few of the various fundamental details that “Afternoons of Solitude” elides of their entirety; if not for the opening title card that says him because the film’s star, we would not even know his identify.
Is Roca married? Does he resent his father? Has he ever felt a second of pity for the animals who’re solely bred in order that he can stab them to loss of life for an inexpensive thrill? Serra estimates that he shot roughly 600 hours of footage as a way to reduce collectively this 120-minute documentary, and but it’s honest to imagine that none of his rushes even hinted on the solutions to these questions. Biking between a trio of discrete and hermetically sealed environments (the sector, the Ritz resort the place Roca stays throughout occasions, and the van that shuttles him between these two areas), and remaining at such a take away from its topic that Serra claims to have solely had a single correct dialog with Roca in the course of the 18-month interval he spent filming him, “Afternoons of Solitude” renders the torero with nearly the identical impenetrable blankness as that of the bulls he fights.
Like essentially the most resonant of Serra’s fiction works (specifically, “Liberté” and “Pacifiction”), the Catalan director’s first documentary is about in a pocket universe too insular and solipsistic to care if it’s shrinking — a liminal area that pathologically obeys its personal logic as a type of self-protection towards the specter of obsolescence. It is a movie outlined by a tunnel imaginative and prescient so intense that we seldom even see the crowds that come to Roca’s occasions, because the torero’s viewers is lowered to abstraction over the soundtrack, their voices heard cheering and jeering him on like an ego at struggle with itself.
Certainly, “Afternoons of Solitude” doesn’t inform us a single factor in regards to the waning recognition of bullfights, nor does it embrace any specific touch upon the pre-Roman customized’s wrestle to outlive in a world extra delicate to animal cruelty. Quite the opposite, Serra’s ambivalent lengthy photographs — zoomed in from afar to offset the movie’s in-your-face depth with an equally palpable sense of distance — construct on themselves to create a perspective on the apply in contrast to any which have been captured on digital camera earlier than in motion pictures like Rouben Mamoulian’s “Blood and Sand” and Francesco Rosi’s “The Second of Reality.”
That is custom divorced from historical past. Spectacle faraway from context. It’s a man wearing sequins mugging at an animal that’s coated in its personal blood; it’s the bare actuality of a dance between man and beast, for all the hazard, pleasure, cruelty, and embarrassment that match-up gives. The sheer truth of watching it within the 12 months 2025 is sufficient to convey every little thing you could know. The movie’s unflinchingly repetitive form permits viewers to lose sight of their perspective similtaneously it invitations them to attract their very own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be extra involving than the didacticism {that a} conventional documentary may convey to the identical matter.
Serra’s method is particularly rewarding as a result of the conclusions it encourages you to attract are in the end simply as irrelevant as those that he arrived at himself. Some may come away from this film with a newfound respect for the monastic focus required of the world’s remaining toreros, whereas others may snigger on the not so latent homoeroticism that permits Roca to really feel like a person amongst males (see: the half the place considered one of Roca’s crew members is pressured to hoist the boss into his skin-tight traje de luces, or “go well with of lights”), or discover themselves re-enraged by the slaughter of animals for sport.
No matter your personal response, the open-ended nature of Serra’s method flies within the face of what folks have been conditioned to anticipate from in the present day’s non-fiction cinema, a lot of which exists to problem the viewers for his or her provincialism whereas flattering them for his or her empathy. And whereas I are likely to suspect that Serra needed to stifle just a few smirks behind the digital camera (“What you probably did in the present day just isn’t attainable by others these days,” considered one of Roca’s hype males says to the torero after he and his workforce of sequined performers ganged as much as stab a confused animal, “it causes envy among the many mediocre, and that’s the reason some spurn you”), “Afternoons of Solitude” is much less involved with the judgment we cross on its topic than it’s with the judgment its topic refuses to cross on himself.
The movie’s poise and construction create an ideal vacuum of self-reflection. “You killed these two bulls so in truth,” Roca is assured, however the “fact” of these deaths is just maintained by the ritual and pageantry of staging them. For Roca to query why he does this for a dwelling can be a deadly blow to the fact that he should (a actuality that falls aside within the one scene with out him in it, throughout which his distressed crew brazenly discusses their helplessness in stopping him from being gored).
I don’t imply to be skeptical in direction of the scale of his balls, which I’m assured are giant sufficient to have their very own magnetic fields, however it’s potential that the plain fearlessness Roca shows within the bullring stems from the mortal terror he feels at having to show — and even know — himself in an setting of some other variety.
How would a person like Roca, who solely finds a peace inside himself on “the front-lines of the soul,” ever study to perform in a world that not makes a spectacle of his bravery? How lonely may life be for the person within the enviornment with out an viewers to exalt in his defiance of loss of life? Serra doesn’t know, doesn’t ask. As a substitute, he watches and watches and watches, providing Roca the biggest crowd of his profession, and daring him to tame time itself.
Grade: B+
“Afternoons of Solitude” is now taking part in in choose theaters.
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