EOY: Afternoons of Solitude

On Albert Serra and his Cahiers-topping bullfighting doc

Afternoons of Solitude (2024)

I’ve been dragging my feet on these End of Year posts. I’m busier than usual this fall, but also generally unenthused with the new releases I’ve seen. Maybe I’ll do a negativity roundup at some point. In the meantime, Albert Serra’s bullfighting documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, just topped this year’s Cahiers du Cinema poll and I’ve been meaning to write about it beyond my reaction from over year ago. The film practically radiates evil, and it’s a rarified object so paradoxically upsetting and gripping, grotesque and delicate, that I do think some scene-setting is helpful. It’s not a film that I would recommend to many people, much less rewatch myself. Nevertheless, I think it’s major, and unquestionably one of the year’s best.

After a pair of adaptations (Don Quixote, The Three Kings) which transformed spiritual epics into transcendental comedies, Albert Serra spent the 2010s exploring a particularly challenging type of period piece, staging ornate 18th-century set productions predicated on extreme alienation effects. In The Death of Louis XIV, he casts French icon Jean-Pierre Leaud as the film’s title character, meticulously documenting the King’s rotting body within the confines of his bedchamber, while in the X-rated Liberté, probably his best film, he shoots a group of libertines having a largely un-simulated nocturnal orgy, filled with tender and tortured kink, in successive chiaroscuro tableau.

Liberté (2019)

Stripping away narrative aside from encroaching death, Serra’s films luxuriate within the body. Rarely has a filmmaker centered their practice so intently on chewing, shitting, sleeping, drinking, fucking, licking, rubbing. The key to Serra’s cinema is a sense of anti-spectacle. As precise as his filmmaking is, he shoots every scene with three simultaneous cameras, occasionally fully distancing himself from the production. In the period pieces, this results in the simple facts of life juxtaposed against the decadence of crumbling empires. His is a cinema of contradictions, totally conceptual but driven by intense physicality, somehow erotic, narcotic, and necrotic all at once. Languishing under the weight of corrosive imperial aesthetics, these later period pieces are pitch-black comedies of decay, and for my money, incredibly moving portrayals of the antagonistic relationship between the human body and Western systems of power.

One of the personal appeals of Albert Serra is that I think he’s one of the 21st century’s flagship queer directors. Part of this is that his work is deeply engaged with a wide expanse of queer filmmaking, from Warhol, Fassbinder, and Pasolini to Martel and Apichatpong, but it’s readily apparent in the films’ desire to break free from history. If there’s an unintuitive humanism to these acerbic portraits of the ruling class, it’s because Serra’s filmmaking asserts an essential humanity beyond literal period trappings. A way to think about this dual consciousness is that Serra often works with a small, tight-knit crew, and on some level, these films really are about a group of close friends playing dress up, processing the apocalyptic present through pleasure. This is especially clear in the early films, Honor of the Knights and Birdsong, where Serra casts his friends as intimately erotic figures stumbling through pastoral landscapes. Somewhere between Gerry, James Benning, and Apichatpong, the characters’ epic quests are directed inwards as Serra finds transcendence in the configuration of their bodies resting against one another, the mundane conversation, and their oblivious communion with nature.

Honor of the Knights (2006)

Another reference point is the short Cubalibre, where Serra stars as the emcee of a Fassbinder-themed club. Pre-saging performances from Twin Peaks: The Return, Cubalibre takes place over an 18-minute musical set by Wolfgang Danz. Serra’s drifting imagery envelops friends, dressed as Fassbinder’s social outcasts, their earnest cinephilia combining with their characters’ connotations of the real world’s oppressive sociopolitical forces. The alien atmosphere Serra creates is both an application of political form, and an invitation into a communal space.

In the 2020s, Serra has expanded his practice in a play for the relative mainstream, producing new films by gay auteurs Alain Guiraudie and Lav Diaz, and setting his sights back on the present-day. Pacifiction, his 2022 political thriller, stars Benoit Magimel as a French High Commissioner stationed in Tahiti as rumors of impending nuclear testing spread across the island. It’s a film with only intimations of conspiracy, portraying Tahiti as an entity existing beyond colonial conception. It also has a Twin Peaks-esque club of its own. In a play on the Lynchian refrain “It’s happening again”, Pacifiction’s radioactive longueurs reflect a community’s helplessness against political regression.

Afternoons of Solitude (2024)

Conceieved alongside Pacifiction, Afternoons of Solitude is Serra’s first feature documentary, observing Peruvian bullfighter Andres Roca Rey across four afternoons in the arena. Shot in telephoto long takes with little to no acknowledgment of an outside world, Serra once again works in the present, but molds reality into something elemental and timeless. In a way, the film is as simple as possible, iteratively following Rey in the arena, his limo, and hotel room, but the effect is otherworldly. By focusing so intently on the haptic specifics of bullfighting, unflinching in its examination of blood on fur, sweat on skin, knife on skull, the film is about the sport in the material and abstract.

Anchored by a predetermined outcome (the death of the bull) and a repetitive structure, Afternoons of Solitude is uninterested in spectacle, and even less interested in explicit condemnation. Serra’s primary concern is faithfully channeling bullfighting’s old-world aesthetics. His film is ethical (see: the nobility his montage confers on the bull), but he refuses to qualify the violence with context. Though he occasionally tips his hand (e.g. the bull is the one who’s actually solitary), the decadence is presented straight-faced so the suspended “Make Spain Great Again” time is experienced first as visceral, transfixing horror far before it registers as a parallel to the rise of fascism. The observations are all the more impactful for their organic origins.

Afternoons of Solitude (2024)

A useful comparison is The Death of Louis XIV. Like that film, which considers the king as a body and as an imperial concept, Afternoons of Solitude uses Andres Roca Rey to deconstruct the image of the torero. The Death of Louis XIV surrounded Leaud’s Sun King with a throng of doctors whose comic ineptitude could be due to the period’s scientific limitations or their own attempts at power. Afternoons of Solitude likewise functions as a cursed community portrait. Roca Rey is flocked by a group of sycophants, presumably failed or aspiring toreros themselves, who act as openers onstage and elevate Roca Rey to hypermasculine caricature. When he’s gored by a bull, but walks away with light injuries, they attribute it to abs of steel. After so much as flicking his wrist, they’re quick to shower him with praise, hyper-fixating on the size of his balls.

The sheer ridiculousness of Roca Rey’s lackeys, and Serra’s isolation of the ass-kissing to transitory spaces of black limos and hotel rooms, is indicative of the torero’s fantastical pageantry. The metaphorical burden of the costume is observed in Roca Rey’s morning routine, a 2-person affair in which the torero is carefully corseted and then violently stuffed into his garb. When Rey later prays in his hotel room, the superficiality of the gesture is undercut by his onstage brutality, filled with comments like “fuck the dead” or the triumphant mutilation of his opponent. The observation of Rey’s routine naturally exposes his image’s foundation in religion and masculinity.

In the arena, Roca Rey’s function as a nationalist symbol connects to a perennial Serra interest in the toxic persistence of colonial aesthetics. This lends a menacing subtext to Roca Rey’s treatment of the bulls, especially their expectation of docility. When an opponent puts up a fight, his team snarls that it’s actually the bull who’s a coward. If Serra’s unsentimental depiction of the torero has any empathy, it’s towards his animal body, forcibly thrust into its restrictive clothing, flung around the arena, performing its dance of death as if by possession. It’s certainly not lost on Serra that Roca Rey is a Peruvian made into a symbol of his historic colonizer.

Afternoons of Solitude (2024)

This thematic interpretation of the film perhaps under-discusses the extent to which Afternoons of Solitude is a formal triumph. Featuring Arthur Tort’s predictably arresting cinematography, the sustained extremity is a uniquely cinematic vantage-point. Aside from occasional intrusions of the soundtrack, Serra’s film drifts around a forensic impasse. It’s closer to the action than any human eye, but psychological access is out of reach. Other reviewers have noted that the film may not be far off from a context-free ESPN broadcast, but that would discount the confidence of Serra’s craft, his precise framings and sinuous camera movement, his insistence on holding an image to its morbid conclusion. It especially discounts the expressionist color-grading of crimson blood, jet blacks, and supple, rosy flesh. Tort brings some of the Rococo voluptuousness of The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté to this film, giving it a sheen of impossible beauty. The intuitive musicality, forming a trio between man, bull, and cinema, is a tour-de-force.

The provocation of the film then is the violence and its aestheticization. Serra’s implication that the aesthetic of bullfighting is intrinsic to its horror is a powerful one. While watching Afternoons of Solitude, I thought of Elon and Trump performing the Nazi salute. One side effect of the Trump era’s constant stream of controversy is the feeling that words and images have lost all meaning. Among its myriad virtues, Afternoons of Solitude isolates one highly-politicized issue and forces us to look, showing us that these forms of nationalist iconography still harbor extreme, cosmic violence. In doing so, Serra performs a process of re-sensitization.

Afternoons of Solitude is distributed by Grasshopper Films and available on VOD.