Critics reviews

Afternoons chooses its aesthetic target with microprecision and refuses to deviate, and I expect that it’s going to remain Festival Director Canon for a while.

Serra’s sparse, meditative documentary about the young Peruvian-born torero Andrés Roca Rey is an enrapturing two hours of erotics and violence, though its brutality makes it challenging to watch.

He [Serra] clearly admires the enormous skills and sheer showmanship that this young matador brings to the sport, yet he is unsparing in his respect for the dignity of the bull and the undignified manner with which the animal’s bloody body is disposed of after meeting his end at the matador’s hand. Serra seems to suggest that both positions can be taken within one piece of art...

Serra strips bullfighting down to its aesthetic and ritualistic components — a fan’s excited knock on the limo is the only indication of an outside world — but doesn’t shy away from what’s obviously made it one of the most controversial European events. This allows us to ask a more interesting question than the one that led this piece: what is bullfighting?

The unsimulated violence and physical risk to both parties is bracing, yet there’s never any vicarious enjoyment gained...

At times, the documentary feels almost too barbaric to stomach. Serra makes the audience watch the bullfights from start to finish, which means there are several bull deaths captured on camera. It is not an easy film to sit through as the brutality is shown bare and the framing of the shots refuses to let you look away.

This latest enterprise sees him [Serra] confidently refining his own personal style, embellishing the familiar fly-on-the-wall format with an array of visual and aural flourishes that combine to produce perhaps the most immersive encapsulation of tauromachy yet achieved in cinema.

Free of commentary and interviews, Serra’s film avoids a rhetorical stance on a practice that continues to be a subject of polarizing debate in the Catalan filmmaker’s homeland. Instead, it permits ample room for the viewer’s own emotional responses as it aloofly observes Roca Rey both in and out of the ring. There’s certainly a fascination here with the contrived spectacle of bullfighting, with its intricate choreography and ornate, spangly costuming, but you’d be hard pressed to describe “Afternoons of Solitude” as celebratory of its subject.

Anyone with a low threshold for cruelty to animals will find this a harrowing watch, but for those with the stomach for it, the doc is a unique study of discipline, bravado, laser focus and showmanship... The film instantly positions itself as one of the most unflinching depictions of bullfighting ever made, admittedly a limited canon.

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.

Afternoon of Solitude is a film that goes against the grain. It’s a cinematic, sensorial experience, a journey through those solitary afternoons of the matador and his entourage, through that struggle between human and animal, and the thin line that separates life and death... and, without doubt, is a truly extraordinary and fascinating movie.

Afternoons Of Solitude marks a departure for Catalan director Serra, whose previous features (most recently, Pacifiction) have been dramas, but whose films as a gallery artist set the tone for this distinctive, confrontational work.