Gored review – the only way is Hemingway in grisly bullfighting study

Antonio Barrera is known for being the most gored professional bullfighter in the biz. So, does this mean that he is the worst living bullfighter? And that the only ones worse have died as their internal organs spilled out on to the sand, while cigar-chomping old men brayed in the stands? Or does it mean that he is the best living bullfighter, because he is the one who most frequently inches up to the precipice of death, daring his taunted, agonised, innocent four-legged prey to take him with them into the beyond? I can’t give you an answer, as I can’t make head or tail of the sport (performance? act of barbarism?) called bullfighting, but I can tell you that Gored is a fascinating portrait of a man some would call driven, and others may call psychotic.

Ido Mizrahy’s documentary is about half typical talking heads, in which we meet folks such as Barrera’s long-suffering wife, who had the experience of watching him tossed about like a rag doll days after their wedding. Also, his sister, who describes the experience in Madrid’s Las Ventas, the most famous Plaza de Toros of all, in which he was pierced, dragged to the infirmary, intubated, thought likely to die, then got up and returned to the ring to finish the job in a bloodstained traje de luces.

Bullfighting commentators and archival footage make a good case that, sure, there’s more to this activity than just slaughtering an animal in public. (Yet don’t think for a minute that the bull ever has a chance. Before the torero gets at him, the picador pierces him from atop a horse and the banderillero jams enormous darts into his neck to wear him down.) But yes, admittedly, there are moves and theatrics and, when the stakes are this high, it is enthralling. A “tragic ballet,” one person calls it.

Gored gets most interesting when it goes inside Barrera’s head. Mizrahy avoids the expected flamenco guitar, using moody, electronic music. After his Madrid injury, Barrera is a man possessed with the ring. “I had lost respect for death,” he says, a great quote throwing fuel on the fire for every Hemingway-esque fantasy about bullfighters. There is a vicious montage of his injuries and his killings, including one shocking moment where he tears open his shirt and shoves his chest directly in front of the horns of a bull, then turning away nearly spitting on the ground. The crowd goes wild. (Personally, I was waiting for the bull to then stab him in the back so I could yell “schmuck!” from my seat, but what the hell do I know about the sangre de los héroes?)

These sequences of showing-not-telling, that include Barrera’s rides from the hotel to the ring, are absolutely fascinating. Helluva way to make a living. Mizrahy also deserves points for keeping Gored a profile of one torero and not propaganda for the sport of bullfighting. He does include footage of one “bad kill,” in which a suffering, bloody bull won’t die easily. However, given where it is in the story, it is used just as much as a symbol for Barrera’s career, and the idea is that your sympathies will lie with both fighters in the ring. I’d like to believe most of us would be rooting exclusively for the fighter on four legs, but bullfighting doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon.