Afternoons of Solitude

Albert Serra · 2024 · 125 minutes
Nov. 8 · Regal 8 · 3:00 p.m.

Explores the spiritual pain of bullfighting, the tormented torero in a ring, one of the most excessive and graphic examples of the origin of Southern European civilization.

Programmer’s Note

Since the premiere of Honour of the Knights at Cannes in 2006, the Spanish-Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra has carved out a unique career, first by adapting classic texts — Don Quixote, the Biblical story of the three Wise Men, and a hybrid of Casanova and Dracula — and then by exploring the grotesque decadence of European high culture in decline. Serra’s 2016 film, The Death of Louis XIV, is an ornate and matter-of-fact representation of the film’s title: the legendary French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, some fifty-seven years after his breakout performance in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, plays the dying king, adorned in full wig and cake makeup, who lies in bed, tended to by doctors and servants until, eventually, he expires.

An important figure in the “slow cinema” movement of the 2000s, Serra has, with his two most recent films, turned his attention to the contemporary world and a somewhat more commercial style, but his target remains the same. Pacifiction (2022), the story of a white-suited French high commissioner enjoying the final spoils of colonial power in Tahiti, was described by critic Peter Bradshaw as “a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia. and apocalyptic despair.”

In some respects, Afternoons of Solitude marks the most dramatic shift yet in Serra’s career. His first feature-length documentary, the film is a riveting portrait of Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey, a gifted bullfighter and impossibly charismatic screen presence. Serra and cinematographer/co-editor Artur Tort rarely turn their gaze away from Roca, documenting not only his mastery in the ring but also his many behind-the-scenes rituals. Serra and Tort clearly recognize the beauty and elegance of bullfighting — you will likely leave the film with a new understanding and appreciation of the sport — but the heightened style of Afternoons of Solitude also offers a timely critique of the intoxicating spectacle of violence.

Warning: Afternoons of Solitude includes frank depictions of the deaths of bulls.