The New Yorker:

Albert Serra’s new documentary about the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey offers a keenly observed—and surprisingly moving—depiction of the blood sport.

By Richard Brody

You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch “Afternoons of Solitude” with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. Full disclosure: I squeamishly watch horror films through my fingers and, in real life, a mere punch in the nose is terrifying to witness. I doubt I’d ever attend a corrida—but this new documentary by Albert Serra, about the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, is one of the most transfixing I’ve seen in a while. There’s blood, and it’s not stage blood; Roca gets hurt, and bulls are killed. Yet the effect that the movie elicits isn’t horror but glory. What makes “Afternoons of Solitude” hard to watch is its assault on assumptions: perhaps justice would be served by the abolition of bullfighting, but Serra proves that, were it to vanish, a source of radical beauty would be lost, too.

Serra’s daringly restrained approach to the subject is at the very source of the film’s disturbing emotional power. There are no talking-head interviews, no voice-overs, no superimposed text or title cards to situate the action. What’s more, there’s an extraordinary austerity to its spectrum of activity, which involves only three kinds of settings: the van in which Roca and his team of about a half-dozen men travel from venue to venue, the hotels in which Roca stays, and the rings in which he fights bulls. Roca is onscreen for nearly the entire film, yet it takes a while to see him in action, because Serra, who followed him over the course of a year and a half, makes the shrewd editorial choice of preparing viewers for a bullfight as Roca himself prepares. First, he’s seen in a van just after a bout, calmly chatting with his crew while still wearing his ornate competitive finery (known as the traje de luces, the “suit of lights”). But the apparent calm of the journey soon proves to be quietly fraught: after arriving in a hotel room, where an assistant helps remove the skintight suit, Roca is still bleeding from an unhealed wound. At every turn, “Afternoons of Solitude” is a drama of blood.

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