Albert Serra – Tardes de soledad AKA Afternoons of Solitude (2024)
Quote:
Yes, a bullfighting movie
It is increasingly rare, within a very fragmented public opinion, where there are few common facts or experiences, for a work of art to provoke what we could call a cultural event. That is to say, that it becomes an event of sufficient importance to channel public debate and to signify, in a certain sphere, a memorable event. Tardes de soledad, the film by Albert Serra, starring the maestro Roca Rey, has achieved something like this. Since its premiere in San Sebastian, this work has aroused a reflection that goes far beyond the criticism itself and that this is so is explained, I think, because we are facing a creation that places us in a stark and unusual way, to such atavistic questions as what is the value of life, what is man, what is art and what is the freedom of the artist. And all this, of course, without hiding the certain fact of death. Tardes de soledad somehow forces you to think in shock.
In his space in El País, the bullfighting critic Antonio Lorca denied to this work -a mischief, according to him- the condition of being a bullfighting movie. I believe, rather, that what Tardes de soledad is not, is a bullfighting film. On bullfighting cinema, which has true masterpieces -more than Serra acknowledges-, Silvia Caramelo published some years ago a great cultural history, in which she brilliantly revealed the narrative archetypes of the genre, from the nationalist costumbrismo or the romantic epic, to the class struggle. In any case, if the approach to the bullfighting world, to its atmosphere and aesthetics, has given rise to extraordinary works, some of them indispensable to know our cultural history, none of these had overcome what seemed to be a constitutive limit for the cinema with respect to bullfighting: the fact that the bullfight is an artistic trance that does not admit representation. Thus, if bullfighting cinema is a rich subgenre, what it lacked was a work capable of cinematically decrypting the dark tremor of bullfighting. And this is what Serra has done. Shooting, strictly speaking, the first bullfighting film, and I would dare to say that also the last, because to tread this ungraspable ground he has stepped on a formal terrain that does not tolerate repetition. In the words of the great Manuel Lombardo, critic of this newspaper, “Spanish cinema has found the only great filmmaker capable of doing justice to the truth at stake in the bullfighting rite”. Nothing more and nothing less. Hence the event for cinema and, of course, for bullfighting.
Víctor Vázquez, “El Diario de Sevilla”.
March 17, 2025
Afternoons.of.Solitude.2024.WEB-DL.1080p.Dream.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 2 h 5 min
Size: 5.37 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 2002x1080
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 6 100 kb/s
BPP: 0.118
Audio
#1: Spanish 2.0ch AAC LC @ 127 kb/s
https://nitro.download/view/3E11B978BD74338/Afternoons.of.Solitude.2024.WEB-DL.1080p.Dream.mkv
Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
