We have never filmed bullfight as Albert Serra has just done with Tarde de Soledad. And we will never film it like that again. First of all because corrida will disappear, most likely, and because Andrès Roca Rey, the bullfighter in question in this film, will also disappear, in a certain way, tomorrow afternoon or in fifty years, whatever happens to him, by dint of letting death caress his hips, he will pass there, and he will remain the biggest cinema.
In Pacifichis previous film, Albert Serra had made Benoît Magimel the largest colonist in cinema. And with The death of Louis XIVby Jean-Pierre Léaud the greatest Sun King in the cinema.
Tarde de Soledad is not a film about bullfight, another a bullfighting documentary. Fearing to have to repeat myself, I will try to say it differently: cinema, in its essence, is no more documentary than fiction. But when he is above this abyss that separates the fiction from reality, when it is the war between the two and the spectator no longer knows if he is lost or if he is simply asked to be intelligent for a session, then he can get out of there, dizzy, passed to the reel, and in a long sigh he finds his Latin: “HIC is opus” (This is a film).
No comment, no music, or very distant: that of the Banda. As always, the technique imposes the method that establishes the style that describes the person who makes the film. Is it good, is it great, what matters is where the filmmaker places his cameras and, as if by chance, this is where the documentary does not install them. And either. But Albert Serra, yes.
The fight of man and the beast, and nothing other than that
It is not only the axes that make the success of the film. It is also the framework, and the time that the cameramans give to the bulls and the bullfighter to enter and leave their frame. This is how this film quickly became a challenge to opinions on bullfight. At mine, yours if you have one. Death, risk, danger, controlled fear, provoked, the fight of man and the beast, and nothing other than that. Embalying by dint of escaping sentimentalism, folklore, snobbery.
The bullfighter Andrès Roca Rey has a little air of Tom Cruise, without the heels. Narcissism, yes, and how not to admire in the mirror of the lens of the camera which films it, then in the transparent reflection of the window of the door of the minibus which takes him, on Sunday afternoon, to visit death, at the time when the others visit their in-laws? The youth of her beauty refutes homo-eroticism, even shirtless. Roca Rey opposes the same seriousness to him as his Enjolatey courtyard: you are a genius, a big one, you are the first, etc. His absence of reaction borders indifference, that may be. He lets himself be imposed by his own nothing that could soften him, facing the bull.
He will go so far as to hate the film, feel betrayed, ask for cuts that he will get or not. Rejection is ultimately the healthiest relationship between the filmmaker and the bullfighter. The blow of betrayal horn for one, the sorrow to see a creature that we thought had caught, escape you. Serra will not have shown the public, he is not a sharing. He will not have told us anything about Roca Rey, his women, his parents, nothing on the profession, the contingencies, the money, the Peru where he was born. When I tell you it’s not a documentary, you can believe me. He did not share his bullfighter with anyone other than us. Thank you and the next one.
When the bullfight will be prohibited in Mexico City, when it will only remain Seville, the Carmen From Bizet to be last rampart, if it resists, it is good, if it disappears, it is also good. Dying is one of the beautiful things in bullfight, dying at best, the whole question is there. The risk is great of too slow agony.
Christophe Donn, writer
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