The Golden Shell makes Albert Serra bigger

First of all, thanks to this triumph his career it stops being a test of how much truth there is in that useful saying that no one is a prophet in their own land: with his second feature film, ‘Honor de cavalleria’ (2006), Serra caught the attention of the very French Cannes Festival, the most important in the world, which has since included in its programming most of his later films; Thanks to ‘Història de la meva mort’ (2013) he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Festival, very prestigious and very Swiss, while our country did not pay attention; and his 2022 feature film, the Franco-Spanish co-production ‘Pacifiction’, obtained no less than nine nominations for the César Awards – two of them were translated into statuettes – and exactly zero nominations for the Goya; until doing it this year at the San Sebastián Festival, in addition, He had never presented one of his films worldwide in Spain. The award obtained today also guarantees that ‘Afternoons of Solitude’ will have among a good part of its viewers people who have never seen a Serra film before and had never even heard of him.

Inevitably, many of those people will go to the cinema attracted by the controversy that the film generated even before its premiere at the festival and for which the award will serve as a speaker. Documentary portrait of the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, whom he observes very closely both inside the ring in front of the bull and during the routines he follows before and after stepping into the arena, is a work evidently fascinated by the ritualistic element, the plasticity, the aesthetics and the mystery that surround the bullfighting but which also, whether intended or not, demonstrates with crystalline clarity how much pain the animal that participates in the bullfight, condemned to die, suffers, because those who intend to kill it surpass it in number and resources, and because without the shedding of its blood the party would be no such thing.

In other words, it has potential to offend animalists and protaurines alike, because the topic is controversial in itself and because, let’s face it, nowadays even coffee with milk is controversial. Those who do not look in ‘Afternoons of Solitude’ for arguments with which reinforce their ideological positions but also artistic valuesyes, you will find in it something very different: on the one hand, a dazzling game of contrasts between the barbaric and the poetic, between the natural and the artifice, between instinct and premeditation and between the hegemonic masculinity of the text and the unmistakable subtext homoeroticism; on the other, an overwhelming, hypnotic and brutal visual and sound experience.

The decision to award him the Golden Shell is incontestable, and that is something that in no way can be said of most of the others that the group of judges chaired by the Galician filmmaker Jaione Camborda has taken. The only way to make sense of the Special Jury Prize awarded to ‘The Last Showgirl’, by Gia Coppola -granddaughter of Francis Ford-, is to understand it as a reward for everything the film has to offer. vindication of its main actress, Pamela Anderson, a performer who suffered for years from objectification, contempt and denigration by the media and the industry; For the rest, it is a crude, superficial work, built on clichés and even insincere. The ideal winner of that award would have been the first feature film by Portuguese director Laura Carreira, ‘On Falling’, a perfect example of the only sensible way to make social cinema – with subtlety and trust in the viewer’s intelligence, without resorting to didacticism or manipulations – which in return has had to settle for sharing ‘ex aequo’ the award for Best Director with Pedro Martín-Calero’s debut film, ‘El llanto’, which uses the horror film language to expose fears that plague our present, and to do so it exhibits astonishing narrative and stylistic precision.

Regarding the award for Best Leading Performance received by Vitoria-born Patricia López Arnaiz for her magnificent work in ‘The Flashes’, the main reply she admits is that Pilar Palomero’s film would have deserved a greater reward, and this is exactly opposite to what can be said about ‘When Autumn Falls’, by François Ozon; that the jury has awarded the award for Best Supporting Performance to his co-star Pierre Lottin is questionable in itself; The fact that it has also rewarded the collection of narrative crudeness, stereotypes, Manichaeisms and crazy plots that make it up by awarding it the award for Best Screenplay already falls into the category of nonsense.