The closest literary analogue to Albert Serra’s astonishing new film, Afternoons of Solitude, is Ernest Hemmingway’s lyrical exploration into the grisly allure of bullfighting – ‘Death in the Afternoon’. For this is a piece of spare cine-portrature about Peruvian/Spanish “maestro” toreador Andrés Roca Rey, with Artur Tort’s camera locked into his every bodily fluctuation and gurning grimace as he whisks a slew of raging bulls back and forth under his cape as blood cascades into the air like champagne.
Yet in terms of its cinematic connections, it sits somewhere between Jeanie Livingston’s classic text on queer expression, Paris is Burning, and those strange faux-ethnographic documentaries such as Mondo Cane which tease viewers with the prospect of seeing real people and animals perish. 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.
The film is structured to focus on the intensity and physicality of the fights themselves, the only respite coming from the bus shuttles to and from hotels, with Roca largely ignoring the torrent of effusive, toadying praise from his omnipresent entourage. The only person Roca is seen engaging with outside of his close circle is a portrait of the weeping virgin that he keeps beside his bed and kisses prior to each bout. He is a celebrity on this circuit, but the only fan we see is one with whom he poses for a photo, offering up his most rictus, insincere smile possible before getting back to thinking about, we presume, death.
As such, you genuinely feel that Roca is a man who only fully exists in the bull ring, a human husk that is suddenly imbued with a startlingly and violent lifeforce. His completely neutral, expressionless demeanour when he’s not fighting is counterpointed with a the most grotesque and theatrical glare when he’s staring down a bloodied beast intent on goring him with its horns. Roca 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.
The film offers no explicit commentary or context, but instead allows the images to speak for themselves. It asks the viewer to choose if they want to be complicit in the violence, and judge whether this is a worthwhile local tradition with widespread sporting value, or an antiquated and foolish spectacle that belongs to another, less refined age. In many ways, Afternoons of Solitude makes for an intriguing partner piece with Serra’s own study of illicit pleasure seeking, Liberté, although this film certainly has a nerve-shredding thrill factor that that film (intentionally) doesn’t.
With men in crotch-emhasising show-costumes constantly talking about balls, having balls, big, giant balls, it’s hard to ignore the queer-coded aspect of the sport which its fans either don’t see or ignore entirely. Roca himself has androgynous facial and bodily features, seen most clearly in once scene in which he poses in a sheer white body stocking and rosary beads around his neck. And the stances and poses he makes in the arena would not look out of place at a New York drag ball.
It’s a remarkable, multifarious work, and despite the controversial subject matter, it’s probably the closes thing that Serra has ever made to a crossover mainstream feature.
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