Matador, The

Documentaries are usually vanity projects: funding difficulties necessitate their being movie-makers' financially unrewarding labours of love or sponsored productions. So it's natural to assume that a Spanish bullfighter's management company funded The Matador, covering three years in the life of an ambitious young man.

In 2003, Granada-born David Fandila (El Fandi), a top-rated 21-year-old set out to be a top ranker. His voice-over interview comments note that most matadors only have six or seven years at their peak and that's when millions can be earned. Fandila's target was appearances at 100 corridas in Spain or South America in one year, a feat only achieved by a dozen other matadors during the ritual sport's recorded history.

One of them, with whom Fandila often co-starred, was Enrique Ponce, a box-office champion who broke the 100-plus record ten times running. A non-aficiando can sense, from the brief extracts shown, that the older Ponce had a calm, classical style of choreography and posing in the ring. Fandila's youth only partly explains his faster, flashier temperament.

Outside the ring, however, he's portrayed as a quietly determined professional, wanting to achieve the glory that had eluded his corrida-crazy family for four generations. Fandila had aped matador moves at the age of four; a family video shows him as an eight-year-old going through the motions with a calf. He and his more reserved brother were well schooled in competitiveness, becoming members of the national ski team. The brother became his personal assistant when Fandila junior switched to bullfighting.

First-time director Stephen Higgins needed to collate material from various sources (family archives, film of El Fandi's early corridas and visit to Lima, B&W media prints, and interviews with the family, managers, bullfighting commentators and a girlfriend who appears only once for an al fresco family meal). Wisely, the production including comments from, and footage of, Spanish anti-bullfighting campaigners (and also sensibly employed a veteran documentary maker, Nina Gilden Seavey, to co-direct it).

Interviewees apologetically stress the sport's cultural, tradition-conscious values, and several corrida scenes do successfully illustrate the beautiful barbarity of a spectacular entertainment and people's ballet. Fandi's massive leg scar, presumably from an early goring, is unexplained, but the movie's audiences do see him tripped, poked, unclothed, and then badly gored by different bulls.

The latter goring occured during the third match in a home-city corrida in which he fought all six bulls. Proudly shooing away nervous ring personnel, he completes the kill, strides out and undergoes back-stage surgery, returning to the ring and fans' oles after 45 minutes to complete the corrida. That was in 2005, when he finally reached his 100-plus target and was the year's top-ranker matador (having appeared in 72 corridas in 2003 and 97 the next year).

Relentlessly supporting a personal staff of six and all his loving family's pressure and needs, El Fandi gives one a sense of the money-making roles that Tiger Woods, Liz Taylor, Michael Jackson et al were obliged to play.

Strangely, the movie's been truncated. First screened in cinemas (in 2008) at a length of 106 minutes, it runs for only 75 on its DVD version. Maybe the producers reckoned that the bullfight's ritual three episodes for a matador's displays would look too much the same to maintain a TV or mainstream audience's interest and respect, so a half-an-hour of them were shunted into a DVD extra. (It doesn't explain the traditions of corrida dress code, and whether genitalia can only be flaunted on the left side.)