It’s freezing in Rotterdam in January and Albert Serra is feeling it. “It’s so cold, it’s hard for me to go to the cinema,” the Catalan director, draped in a heavy coat, told the sell-out crowd before a Saturday night screening of Afternoons of Solitude. It’s an odd place and an odd time to be watching a film about bullfighting, but this late-winter climate certainly helps to emphasise its position as something of an alien transmission. The film follows Andrés Roca Rey, a superstar matador, and his team as they move from bullfight to bullfight over the course of several months, with long takes observing all the processes and routines that come with it. Serra captures the long car journeys between fights with a camera fixed to the back of a headrest in a Rolls Royce SUV, pointed squarely at Roca Rey as he sits in an awkward closeup with everyone else looming in the background. Elsewhere, a lingering camera emphasises the time he spends getting ready in opulent hotels, underlining the complexity and flamboyance of this clothing and the awkwardness of putting it on and taking it off. And then there are the bullfights themselves, violent, tense, and extremely drawn out so as to make visible every gesture, every sound and every detail, with unblinking ferocity.
A film of interiors, where even an arena in the pouring rain becomes a private space, sealed off from the world, existing only between a man and his art. Much like Howard Hawks did with Red Line 7000, Serra never shows the crowd, keeping their gasps, their cheers, and their boos off-screen. This isn’t about spectacle or entertainment, but a ritualistic study of one man’s obsessive pursuit of perfection, for his own benefit and nobody else’s. Again and again he gets in the ring, goading creatures that could easily kill him (and on multiple occasions, they almost do), only to do it all again the next time, and the next. He’s never happy, constantly critiquing the minutiae of his performance or the length of time it took for a bull to die after his killing blow. But he continues, with help from his sycophantic team, who relentlessly inflate his ego and build his confidence (“what balls you have!”).
It’s easy to see Serra’s interest in this world. His characters tend to be powerful, regal, and hubristic, but ultimately fragile, and Andrés Roca Rey is certainly of this lineage, much like the aging Casanova of Story of My Death, the bed-ridden king in The Death of Louis XIV, and the increasingly irrelevant De Roller of Pacifiction. The only difference is that while these men are all fading forces, Roca Rey is at the peak of his powers. The best bullfighter in the world. A man of great violence and great fragility, whose artistry requires him to exude arrogance while risking his life. If anything, it’s bullfighting that’s fading around him. A fascinating and barbaric tradition, increasingly out of place in the modern world, but still able to draw an audience. And so, as long as the crowd keeps baying for blood, people like Andrés Roca Rey will continue to refine their art until there’s nobody left to watch it.
The day after seeing Albert Serra’s film, I saw Wei Shujun’s equally sun-drenched I Dreamed A Dream on a night just as cold, or maybe even colder than the last. The film, receiving its world premiere at the festival, follows five rappers pushed together as part of a competitive audition process and left marooned at a beach resort while they wait (and wait) for a mysterious director to arrive to start shooting a film with them. There’s nothing much for them to do, so they just hang out on the beach, working on their tans and watching Wild Strawberries on a laptop, all at the request of the director (named Godod, of course) but communicated to them via his irritable assistant, whose role is to keep them focused and make sure they stick around. As their boredom intensifies, and their wait goes on, they each begin to have dreams that can barely be distinguished from reality. One of the men imagines himself as the director, shooting a scene and impatiently delivering vague notes to his actors. Another has a flirtatious back-and-forth with a woman in a bar in fluent French, while another tries to leave the hotel and go home, in spite of the increasingly desperate and theatrical pleas of the director’s assistant.
Shot quickly as a self-described stop-gap between other projects, I Dreamed A Dream has the feel of being made up on the fly. Time passes, and nothing really happens. Scenes stretch out in long takes, lingering as if waiting for something that never arrives, offering no escape from the monotony. And then, suddenly, another place, another time, another situation to navigate. In this state of suspended animation, stuck on an island, in hotels and on beaches, all these men have is each other, and Wei emphasises this camaraderie throughout, showing them writing songs together, hanging out together, and rallying together to make fun of the director’s assistant. In these long scenes, there’s no fixed point of view. The camera observes the group as if filming a documentary. But in dreams, each of the men has his own perspective. A set of images designed to reveal something personal that isn’t necessarily visible in the collective. Wei offers no interpretation of these dreams. They just drift in and out, much like the rest of it. Time passes, and everything blends together, be it dream and reality, performance and reality, fact and fiction. A beguiling puzzle-box from a fascinating new voice.