The Peruvian Matador Andrés Roca Rey has huge testicles. Easily one of the largest sets on earth. We never see them for ourselves, but they are all that his crew of the hypemen can talk about. “Such big balls!”, A member of Rocas Entourage insists. “Your balls are bigger than the whole damn arena!”, Another.
The dominant topic of conversation in a documentary where almost nothing else is ever discussed, the size of Roca’s nuts pointed so often – and with such gloomy sobriety – all the time Albert Serra’s Transfixing ”Afternoons of loneliness“That I began to worry about the world’s largest tohero can have a serious medical condition of some kind.
If he did, you really wouldn’t learn about this, like Serra film is not much for personal details. Where Roca was born, which is why he undertook his life to the performative slaughter of horned cattle, and what he does with his time outside the bull capture are just some of the many basic facts like “afternoons of loneliness” elids in its entirety; If not for the opening card that announces him as the movie’s star, we may not even know his name.
Is Roca married? Does he shift his father? Has he ever felt a moment of sin for the animals that are just bred so he can stick them to death for a cheap tension? Serra estimates that he shot about 600 hours of pictures to cut this 120-minute documentary, and yet it is fair to assume that none of his rushes even suggested answers to these questions. Cycling between a trio of discreet and hermetically sealed environments (Arenan, the Ritz hotel where Roca stays during events, and the van that shakes him between the two places), and that he remained away from his subject to serra claims that they had only a single conversation of the 18-month period as he spent as he he spent as he he spent as he he spent as he he spent as he spent as he spent the 18-month period as he he spent as he by Solity by Solitude of Solity of Solitude of Solitude of Solitude of Solitude of Solitude of Solitude of Solitude of Solitess of the Render of the Pore of Talness Bulls he struggles.
As the most resonance of Serra’s fiction works (namely, “Freedom“And”Pacificion“), The Catalan Director’s First Documentary is set in a pocket universe too insular and solipsistic to care if it’s shrinking-a liminal space that pathologically obeys its own logic as a form of self-protection. So intense that we selfdom even see the crowds that come to roca’s events, as the torero’s audience is reduced to abstraction over the soundtrack, their voices heard cheering and jerera him as an ego at war with himself.
In fact, “afternoons of loneliness” does not tell a single thing about the declining popularity of the bullfights, nor does it include any explicit comment on the struggle of the pre-Roman customs to survive in a world that is more sensitive to the cruelty of animals. On the contrary, the ambivalent long shot zoomed in at a distance to compensate the film’s in-your-face intensity with an equally tangible sense of distance-building on themselves to create a perspective on the exercise that has not been caught on the camera before in films such as Rouben Mamoulian’s “Blood and Sand” and Frances Rosis “Moment.
This is tradition separate from history. Spects away from context. It is a guy dressed in sequins who rob an animal covered in his own blood; It is the naked reality of a dance between man and animals, for all danger, excitement, cruelty and embarrassment that match-up provides. The great fact of watching it in 2025 is enough to convey everything you need to know. The film’s unclear repetitive form allows viewers to lose their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a scam that turns out to be more involved than the didactism that a traditional documentary can provide the same subject.
Serra’s strategy is particularly rewarding as the conclusions it encourages you to draw are in the end as irrelevant as the ones he arrived in himself. Some may get away from this movie with a newcomer respect for the monastery focus required by the world’s remaining toreros, while others can laugh at the not so latent homoerotic that allows Roca to feel like a man among men (see: The part where one of Roca’s crew members is forced to lift the boss in his skin-really Lightweightor “light suit”), or is re -reported by the slaughter of animals for sports.
Regardless of your own reaction, the open nature of Serra’s attitude flies to what people have conditioned to expect from today’s non-fiction cinema, many of which are to challenge the audience for their provincialism while flattering them for their empathy. And while I tend to suspect that serra had to stifle some smirks behind the camera (“what you did today is not achievable by other nowadays,” says one of Roca’s hype men to Torero after he and his team of sequins went up to knit a confused animal, “it causes an envy of himself.
The film’s poise and structure create a perfect vacuum of self -reflection. “You killed the two bulls so truthfully,” Roca is safe, but “the truth” in these deaths is maintained only by the ritual and Pageantry to arrange them. For Roca to question why He does this for a living would be a deadly blow to the reality that he must (A reality that falls apart in one scene without him in it, under which his distressed crew openly discusses their helplessness in preventing him from being gored).
I do not mean to be skeptical of the size of his balls, which I am sure is big enough to have their own magnetic fields, but it is possible that the undeniable fear that Roca shows in the bull ring from the deadly terror he feels like having to prove – or even Know – itself in an environment of some other kind.
How would a man like Roca, who only finds a peace in himself on the “soul’s front lines”, ever learn to work in a world that no longer makes an acting of his courage? How lonely can life be for the man in the arena without an audience raising himself in his resistance of death? Serra doesn’t know, don’t ask. Instead, he looks and looks and looks at Roca as the biggest audience in his career and dares him to tame himself.
Rating: B+
“Afternoon of Solitude” now plays in selected theaters.
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