Afternoons of Solitude (Spanish: Tardes de soledad) is a 2024 documentary film directed by Albert Serra about the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey.[2] Though Roca is on screen throughout, the film contains neither commentary nor interviews, and reveals very little about Roca's personality, motives, or his life outside bullfighting.[3]
The film depicts matador Andrés Roca Rey and his entourage throughout fourteen corridas. There are long extended fight sequences filmed very close up, punctuated by torero Roca and his entourage, before or after these sometimes bloody sequences, traveling by car and talking about the performance of Roca. There are also scenes of Roca in his hotel room praying and dressing or undressing from his flamboyant traje de luces (suit of lights) costume before or after these corridas.[4]
Production
The film is a Spanish-French-Portuguese co-production by Andergraun Films alongside Lacima Producciones, Idéale Audiences, and Rosa Filmes.[5] Production was extended by five years, three years for shooting footage and two for editing the material.[6]
The color cinematography, by Artur Tort Pujol, is often very closely focused on Roca and his face, isolating him in a way similar to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's 2006 documentary of Zinedine Zidane called Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.[citation needed] Extreme closeups sometimes isolate details in the ring: like the bull's hooves or its face during its death throes or the side of the picador's horse. The film makes however no overt comment about bullfighting.
The film was scheduled to debut at the Kursaal on 23 September 2024, in competition for the Golden Shell of the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival.[6] Ahead of the film's premiere, PACMA asked for its removal from the festival slate.[6] It also made it to the slate of the 2024 New York Film Festival.[3] The film was distributed in Spain by A Contracorriente Films, with an theatrical release in Spain set for 7 March 2025.[8][9] Meanwhile, Dulac programmed a rollout in French theatres for 26 March 2025.[10] Films Boutique acquired international sales rights.[5]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 43 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Afternoons of Solitude is a stark, ritualistic immersion into bullfighting whose open-ended editing and sensory repetition pursue an unflinching purity, marking it as one of Albert Serra's most mature and unexpectedly accessible works."[11]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[12]
Luis Martínez of El Mundo gave the film 4 stars, declaring it as "a monumental, precious, precise, brutal, grief-stricken, tragic, beautiful and, from any point of view, unique film".[13]
Jonathan Romney of ScreenDaily described the film as "a deeply immersive work and an unashamedly repetitive one".[3]
