Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude

Afternoons of Solitude, whose title may or may not intentionally echo the title of Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 ode to bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, opens with a close-up of a bull before switching to Andrés Roca Rey, the Peruvian-born star torero, and sticking with him for the remaining two hours. In a ritual that dates back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, Roca Rey leads the bull “gradually to its death through a time-honored succession of taunts, parries, and jabs,” writes Jonathan Romney in Screen. Roca Rey’s “movements are as formalized as a ballet dancer’s, down to his repertoire of fierce looks—a human emulation of untamed animality.”

“Anyone with a low threshold for cruelty to animals will find this a harrowing watch,” warns the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “but for those with the stomach for it, the doc is a unique study of discipline, bravado, laser focus, and showmanship.” Afternoons “evinces many qualities familiar from [Serra’s] dramatic features, among them the atmospheric, quasi-dream state; the long takes, usually from a fixed angle; the repetitions; the contemplative silences; the embrace of moral ambiguity.”

Calling Afternoons “a major work from a richly maturing filmmaker” in his review for Variety, Guy Lodge notes that “the film cycles between three principal spaces: the roaring, unidentified bullrings where Roca Rey performs; the cosseted car in which he travels to and from venues, surrounded by a fawning all-male entourage; and the plush hotel rooms in which he silently assembles and disassembles his gaudy matador armor, with gleaming metallic threads and sequins often caked in blood.”

“Far from being a face-value celebration of the extreme machismo that fuels this death sport, Serra stands back to offer objective observation and allows the political subtexts and imagery to emanate naturally,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. Roca Rey “appears not only as a man without fear, but a man who elicits a certain erotic pleasure from narrowly escaping having his body torn to shreds in public, day in, day out. And on a couple of occasions here, he comes extremely close.” At the Film Stage, David Katz finds that, with “his composed visage and relaxed, pretty eyes,” Roca Rey “resembles a gangster, or a renegade young aristocrat from a Visconti film.”

Ela Bittencourt notes at the top of her conversation with Serra for the Notebook that the director references Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon “as two artistic guiding lights. With his quirky mustache and playful antics, Dalí may seem today like an uncle with a proclivity for pranks, but the visceral brutality of Bacon’s giant chunks of human flesh—torn, sullied, yet exuding an uncanny eroticism—indeed matches the spirit of Serra’s new film. In it, blood has viscosity and volume.”