Tardes de Soledad: a staggering documentary (critic)
The director of Pacific signs a new summit by probing both the sovereign and grotesque part of the human in this film on a bullfighter.
An almost mutic unfathomable face contradicted by an almost naked body that contains itself in front of a Greek statue -style ice cream. Through his twists, the muscles refer a palpable energy, probe the very idea of perfection to the Michelangelo. The bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, 28, bathed in a ritualized, carved world where the simulacrum is constantly opposed to an animal force capable of unloading it. All of which precedes the entry on the scene (the arena) thus responds to a religious condition where the sovereign body would have both awareness of its transcendence and its fragility. Each injury will have the appearance of a Christian stigma.
Albert Serra (Pacific) Signs here his first documentary and isolates this being prisoner of a bubble where a whole world is ready to sacrifice himself for him. The off-champ is immense, not only made a very tight framing but above all a confusing spatialization by the sound. Where the recent Gladiator 2 From Ridley Scott made the arena an overbidding place, tightened everything about it immerses us by immersion and subtraction as close as possible to extreme tension.
He seizes the mysteries of a choreography between man and a bull where the beauty that some will say sacrilege, is defiled by the very people who intend to shape it. The public excluded from the frame therefore does not refer anything to the spectator leaving the spectator the only care of the gaze. Hence these vertiginous proximity plans in the car which bring the bullfighter far from the raging crowd. Impressive.
Of Albert Serra. Duration 2h05. Released March 26, 2025
