Glory and Gore in “Afternoons of Solitude”

You don’t have to love bullfighting to observe “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any greater than you must like crime to take pleasure in a movie noir. Full disclosure: I squeamishly watch horror movies via my fingers and, in actual life, a mere punch within the nostril is terrifying to witness. I doubt I’d ever attend a corrida—however this new documentary by Albert Serra, concerning the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, is among the most transfixing I’ve seen shortly. There’s blood, and it’s not stage blood; Roca will get harm, and bulls are killed. But the impact that the film elicits isn’t horror however glory. What makes “Afternoons of Solitude” onerous to observe is its assault on assumptions: maybe justice can be served by the abolition of bullfighting, however Serra proves that, had been it to fade, a supply of radical magnificence can be misplaced, too.Serra’s daringly restrained strategy to the topic is on the very supply of the movie’s disturbing emotional energy. There aren’t any talking-head interviews, no voice-overs, no superimposed textual content or title playing cards to situate the motion. What’s extra, there’s a rare austerity to its spectrum of exercise, which includes solely three sorts of settings: the van during which Roca and his workforce of a couple of half-dozen males journey from venue to venue, the motels during which Roca stays, and the rings during which he fights bulls. Roca is onscreen for practically the complete movie, but it takes some time to see him in motion, as a result of Serra, who adopted him over the course of a 12 months and a half, makes the shrewd editorial selection of getting ready viewers for a bullfight as Roca himself prepares. First, he’s seen in a van simply after a bout, calmly chatting together with his crew whereas nonetheless sporting his ornate aggressive finery (generally known as the traje de luces, the “swimsuit of lights”). However the obvious calm of the journey quickly proves to be quietly fraught: after arriving in a resort room, the place an assistant helps take away the skintight swimsuit, Roca continues to be bleeding from an unhealed wound. At each flip, “Afternoons of Solitude” is a drama of blood.As soon as Roca is within the ring, Serra’s technique turns rigorously and prudently observational. The director and his digicam operators (he principally shoots utilizing three cameras) are normally someplace within the viewers alongside bizarre ticket holders (and sometimes on platforms used for TV broadcasts), and Roca is principally filmed from afar, with zoom lenses that paradoxically present him and the bulls in excessive element whereas nonetheless evoking excessive distance from the motion. Nothing within the film means that the operators themselves are within the ring and bodily dodging hazard. The photographs have a poise, a relaxed, a precision that, from the contemplative security of the stands, is all of the extra passionately attentive to the hazard that Roca, his workforce, and, for that matter, the bulls confront. The takes typically run very lengthy; the ensuing continuities of house and time unfold the choreographic splendor of the bullfighter’s work and convey a harrowing sense of no exit from the sector of battle.The primary corrida within the movie condenses its many segments right into a bravura sequence of a dozen minutes: each an summary of the standard order of enterprise and a number of prime moments from a theatre of dying. First, Roca calls, taunts, and dodges the bull as a picador lances its again; the wounded bull leaves blood on the horse’s protecting blanket and the rider’s steel footbox. A banderillero enters the ring on foot and runs daringly near the bull, planting barbed sticks in its shoulder earlier than deftly dashing away. Then, with the bull bleeding and weakened, Roca bears his sword beneath his cape and executes shut passes, turning his again on the animal, wiggling his hips, shaking his head cockily, and goading it with a cry of “Toro, toro!,” solely to be knocked flat and practically trampled by the enraged beast. Spoiler: Roca will get up, shakes it off, and, to the viewers’s rhythmic chants of “To-re-ro, to-re-ro!,” returns to the fray. Moments later, after asking an affiliate within the stands,“You assume we shut their mouths?,” Roca returns to tackle one other bull.The soundtrack provides to the sense of haunted drama: members of Roca’s workforce put on tiny radio microphones, choosing up their voices—whether or not discourse or cries—and that of the bullfighter himself, who refused to put on a mike, and who battles to the rise and fall of the group’s gasps and cheers. The language with which his entourage exhorts him has a Hemingwayesque high quality of terse grandiloquence: one calls out to Roca that he’s on “the entrance strains of the soul.” (The dialogue additionally reaches a bit decrease on the philosophical scale, with its frequent testicular references—“Life is nothing, you’ve obtained balls”—and equally macho exclamations, as when a workforce member tells Roca, “Go kick ass, maestro, go together with the greats.”)The impact is virtually martial. Roca is a person at warfare, and even when he wins, he type of loses. In a single bout, he’s first flipped to the bottom and prodded by the bull, then slammed into the ringside boards, solely barely spared a horrific goring by getting pounded by the bull’s head primarily between the horns. Roca—together with his pants torn and blood exhibiting via—returns to combat and in the end brings the bull down with one fierce thrust, leaving the sword in its again. An offended and relieved teammate taunts the vanquished animal, “Go be a part of your fucking mom cow.” Roca’s response, nonetheless, is sort of a eulogy: “Bull, you spared me.” Serra is respectful, too. The digicam operators catch the animals in full and livid closeups, they usually pay dignified consideration to bulls’ dying agonies, their thrusts and their tremors, their gazes misting over, their eyes rolling again of their heads—and to the banal final rites of the corpses, chained to the horses that drag them off.