Afternoons of Solitude (2025)

Very beautiful. Long, glorious shots. Males acting like roosters because roosters are cool and have sharp things. Or some reason they don't go in to here. Aside from the flag sword guy, there’s the spear sticking male too. He doesn't get to act like a rooster. More of a guy. It’s a crazy sport. Lots of opportunity for tension. I feel this is something to have on repeat in some corner of the room to be reminded how much shit this guy wears or how violent bull fighting is.

Now this is certainly not a film for the squeamish, so be warned - it spares the viewer little of the violence of bullfighting. That's not it's aim, though, as it follows some days in the life of acclaimed matador Andrés Roca Rey. He is an handsome and confident young man who brings something distinctly theatrical to his displays in the ring against bulls who are no more inclined to give him quarter than he them. Now fair fights these are not and the chances of the bull competing against a team of men who distract, exhaust and ultimately destroy it don't look especially high, but Rey is frequently on the wrong end of the butts and even the horns and the intimate photography illustrates something of those dangers too. What I found to be most bizarre from a series of scenarios to which that word could readily apply, was the attitudes of the crowds. They appreciate the finery of the intricate costumes, the artistry that borders on the dancing and then contrast those with the baying sounds that wouldn't have sounded out of place in the Roman Collisseum two millennia earlier. He is adored, celebrated and successful but what I saw from the (over-used) dash-cam coverage as he moves from fight to fight was a man who had little else in his life behind this conveyor belt style of existence. There are plenty of behind the scenes looks with his team, his doctors and of the trappings of success but in the end I couldn't help but think his was an empty life that offered very little that wasn't performance-related and was, thereby, quite a fickle dalliance with fame. It is too long, and at times borders on the repetitious, but it's still quite a fascinating look at a sport that has survived the tests of time despite it's obvious cruelty and brutality.