Albert Serra’s Startling Matador Doc

Albert Serra‘s “Afternoons of Solitude” begins not taking the bull by the horns, but looking it in the eye. It opens on a blunt close-up of a magnificent bovine specimen staring straight to camera, its gaze somehow confrontational, even as its pupils are nearly lost in the glossy obsidian monument of its head. The beast presumably doesn’t know it’s about to die, but seems angrily resigned to its fate anyway — or more likely we feel angry on its behalf, and project that back onto this regal image. In the course of the next two hours, Serra’s extraordinary documentary about the ritual grandeur and violent indignity of Spanish bullfighting will never again observe its animal victims quite so intimately, but neither do we forget the shot: Even as the film’s focus shifts to the bull’s human conqueror, star Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey, it’s that doomed stare that haunts us.

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. The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthouse fare, doesn’t flinch in his presentation of animal abuse and suffering.

That frankness may make the film something of a hot potato for distributors, and has duly drawn protests from Spanish animal-rights groups ahead of its world premiere in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival. (New York will host its international premiere next week.) But this is a major work from a richly maturing filmmaker, of a piece with his recent fiction features in its use of languid repetition and sensory saturation to pull the audience into something approaching a discomfiting dream state.

There’s little attempt to impose a narrative arc on the two-hour-plus proceedings, as the film cycles between three principal spaces: the roaring, unidentified bullrings where Roca Rey performs; the cosseted car in which he travels to and from venues, surrounded by a fawning all-male entourage; and the plush hotel rooms in which he silently assembles and disassembles his gaudy matador armor, with gleaming metallic threads and sequins often caked in blood. Though much time is spent watching Roca Rey either psyching himself up for fights or decompressing afterwards, “Afternoons of Solitude” isn’t a character study: He remains a remote, taciturn presence throughout, and Serra has little interest in investigating the man’s interior or domestic life, covering merely the adrenaline rush and drop of his work routine.

In some senses, Roca Rey seems as much an object as the ill-fated bull: In one witty preparation scene, an assistant helps him into his impossibly snug taleguilla breeches by nonchalantly lifting his entire body and shaking him into the garment, treating him more like a mannequin than a master. And while his acolytes shower him with praise in the car from the stadium, their praise is so hyperbolic as to be almost dehumanizing: “You’re a giant, a warrior, your balls are bigger than the whole fucking arena,” they drone on, as he ignores them, stoically staring off into the middle distance. You can sense Serra’s amusement by such absurdities, not to mention the homoerotic undertow to all this vain masculine puffery, though the stark contrast between these ceremonial details and the visceral pain and peril of what happens in the ring stops us short.

For no amount of fancy footwork and brilliant carmine-colored silk can conceal the ugly fact that this storied Spanish tradition is an exercise in killing for sport. Serra and his regular DP Artur Tort Pujol (who also edits the film with the director) aren’t out to hide that either, eschewing grandiose wide shots for tighter closeups that isolate and accentuate the grisly physical destruction under way — often excluding the assembled crowd from the frame, leaving us feeling oddly, luridly unaccompanied in our spectatorship.

At a certain point, the film’s emphasis shifts again from Roca Rey, pristinely poised even when under two-horned attack, to the bull itself, felled and furious and glistening with its own blood, before it’s dragged to its death in chains. It’s an end, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a victory, even as Roca Rey and his fellow fighters take a preening lap of honor in their gilded finery. Stoic but hardly numb to the glaring sensation of it all, “Afternoons of Solitude” leaves it to the viewer to determine what beauty, if any, is left in this brutality.