Leo Goldsmith
Albert Serra continues his provocative explorations of white European power and decadence in a documentary about
bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey.
Andrés Roca Rey (center foreground) in Afternoons of Solitude. Courtesy Grasshopper Film.
Afternoons of Solitude, directed by Albert Serra,
now playing at Film at Lincoln Center
• • •
“No animals were harmed during the making of this film” is not a phrase you will see in the credits of Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude. The film’s subject is bullfighting, an activity intimately linked with a very specific notion of Spanish national identity, as well as a highly controversial entertainment structured around the ritualized taunting, maiming, and killing of animals.
The Catalan director’s first documentary—and, according to him, likely his last—Afternoons of Solitude follows a single torero, Andrés Roca Rey, with seemingly little embellishment. Over the film’s two hours, the charismatic young Peruvian faces a series of six bulls (a simulation of the structure of a traditional corrida de toros), with only a hazy picture of life outside the arena. There are almost no shots of the crowd, save for those observers on the immediate sidelines of the ring (though we hear cheers, whistles, derisive comments, and some collective ¡olés! from beyond the frame). And there is almost no sense of the larger world—just total focus on Roca Rey, the arena, his hotel, and the van that takes the fighter between the two. Even the members of his entourage receive very little attention: they often form a mere background, tending to the star’s needs, whims, and ego with supportive phrases like “You showed a huge pair of balls” and “what an incredible human.” Otherwise, the film focuses exclusively on the bullfighter and his opponent.
Andrés Roca Rey (center) in Afternoons of Solitude. Courtesy Grasshopper Film.
In this way, the movie has drawn comparisons with similarly up-close studies of athletes at work, notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait (2006), as well as the films that inspired and were inspired by it: respectively, Hellmuth Costard’s Football as Never Before (1971), about Man U’s George Best, and Spike Lee’s Kobe Doin’ Work (2009). These documentaries are rather uncomplicated in their devotion to their subjects, and it is perhaps possible to read Serra’s as hagiography as well. As it hints at the “solitude” in the title, Artur Tort’s camera, situated low in the stands, captures the action with telephoto lenses that crunch the space of the arena into tensely claustrophobic framings, magnifying the sense of imminent catastrophe. The danger is indeed very real and palpable: Roca Rey is gored and close to severe injury or death on several occasions, as are the members—both human and animal—of his team, including the horses ridden by the lance-wielding picadores. Whatever we think of the sport itself, it’s hard not to admire Roca Rey’s fortitude. And yet, as the images of the fighter’s solitary heroism begin to blur into a near-Brakhagian soup of visual noise, color, and sensation, a more ambiguous, even sinister picture emerges.
With its intricately ritualized bloodlust, its spectacle of opulence and national heritage, bullfighting comes ready-made with a set of weighty ideological implications. In recent years, it has emerged as a controversial symbol at the heart of Spain’s culture wars, a signifier of the country’s bad old days and something like the Iberian right’s answer to American football and British fox-hunting. Longtime fascist dictator Francisco Franco defended the corrida as part of the country’s patrimony and even banned its most famous American depiction, Munro Leaf’s 1936 children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, as pacifist propaganda.
With his neurotic routines of self-blessing and crucifix-kissing, Roca Rey appears as a highly ambivalent star. Despite his Latin American origin, he is nonetheless the avatar of a peculiarly European tradition and Spanish neo-nationalism. Coiffed and boyishly handsome, with an air of effortful machismo about him, the bullfighter would resemble a cocky young investment banker were it not for his almost comically baroque attire: a suit thickly brocaded with sequins, lace, and tassels; knickers and dainty ballet flats; and silk thigh-high socks in a jaunty pink. When we first meet Roca Rey, this regalia is already spattered with the bodily fluids of toro and torero alike: blood, sweat, feces, snot, drool.
Andrés Roca Rey in Afternoons of Solitude. Courtesy Grasshopper Film.
Shrewdly, Serra waits until the film’s midpoint to give us the backstage view of the bullfighter preparing his costume, which is so cumbersome and butt-huggingly tight that Roca Rey must be hoisted into it by a faithful valet. Capturing the torero as he tucks his cock into his snug body stocking, this dressing-up scene is one of many instances of Serra subliminally queer-coding this demimonde of performative masculinity—the moment almost seems transplanted from Jennie Livingston’s classic portrayal of late-1980s New York ball culture, Paris Is Burning. As a performer, Roca Rey is theatrical to the point of camp, mesmerizing in his focus, precision, and derring-do. He turns his back on the enraged, exsanguinating beast mere feet away from him while striking bizarre gestures: back arched, chest puffed up, one arm akimbo, a jerky hair flip. At the film’s most heightened moments, when Roca Rey stares down his combatant in a display of reckless bravado, spectators and toro alike are ensorcelled by his maniacal, piercing gaze, eyes cartoonishly bulging, mouth contorted into a nearly Trump-like pucker.
In this violent extravaganza Serra has found a subject seemingly tailor-made for his sensibilities and predilections. It is very much of a piece with his narrative work, which often blends excessive mise-en-scène and portrayals of white European decadence with provocative instances of BDSM, crypto-fascist iconography, and debauchery in all of its forms. Even the director’s more accessible and thematically restrained films, The Death of Louis XIV (2016) and Pacifiction (2022), are obsessed with white power and its many dissipations. At his most extreme, Serra has made at least two films about the decadence of the eighteenth-century European nobility: 2013’s The Story of My Death, which imagines an encounter between Casanova and Dracula, and 2019’s Liberté, a two-hour-plus film depicting a Sadean forest orgy, complete with piss play, the sexualized torture of an amputee, and unsimulated rimming.
Andrés Roca Rey (center foreground) in Afternoons of Solitude. Courtesy Grasshopper Film.
While Afternoons of Solitude lingers on bullfighting’s pageantry and excitement, it is also unsparing in its portrayal of the sport’s openly cruel and grisly nature—how much it thrives on the sadistic enjoyment of abuse and humiliation. Serra is in no way trying to score points with PETA here; this is simply the evident attitude of those who participate in it, at least as evidenced by the film’s rather deadpan depiction. One might expect the toreros to extol the nobility of combat or the fortitude of the arena’s victims. Instead, they consistently call the animal a “coward,” “criminal,” or “bastard.” In one sequence, a puntillero deals the bull a final death blow—a quick stab in the top of the skull; he then uses the sharp knife to slice off the beast’s ear as a trophy—with the phrase “Go join your fucking cow mother!” Later, one of Roca Rey’s team declares, “Fuck the dead.”
“The first metaphor was animal,” as John Berger noted. Animals have long figured in human imagination as a means of establishing differentiation and hierarchies among species and, by extension, social classes and ethnicities. The corrida emerges, then, as less an honorable contest between man and beast and more a spectacle of humanity’s dominance—a cavalcade of machismo, nationalism, and bloodlust that, while atavistic, now seems more present than ever.
Leo Goldsmith is a writer, teacher, and curator based in Brooklyn.