Spain’s most famous cop has a combover and poor personal hygiene and is corrupt, racist and venerates the memory of the dictator Francisco Franco.
And now he’s aiming for the country’s highest office. The latest film featuring José Luis Torrente, the picaresque creation of the director-actor Santiago Segura, has broken box-office records, grossing more than €7 million since its release at the weekend.
Torrente, presidente (“Torrente for President”), which Segura says is intended as a riposte to Spain’s polarising politicians, has drawn about one million Spaniards to cinemas. The film is on everyone’s lips.
Its success comes as the most obvious target of its satire, the populist right-wing party Vox, appears to have peaked. Vox is lampooned in the film as Nox. The party failed to meet expectations of a historic surge in Castile and Leon’s regional election last weekend, which only confirmed its place as the country’s third party.
Vox has dropped 2.3 points from the 18.9 per cent of the vote predicted in February, according to the state pollster CIS. Analysts suggest party infighting and its anti-system stance is taking a toll on its appeal.
The slowing down of Vox’s popularity, after two previous regional elections in which it doubled its number of seats, will be a source of optimism for Segura. At his film’s launch he called for less divisive and more constructive politics. “I’m really fed up with seeing all this division,” he said. “It feels like we hate each other. This whole civil war vibe.”
Analysts suggest Vox’s popularity has soared in recent years as anti-immigration sentiment in Spain increases, a housing crisis bites and corruption cases taint the Socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister.
Santiago Abascal, the president of Vox, campaigns for the Castille and Leon regional electionClaudia Alba/Europa Press/Getty Images
A poster for the filmAmiguetes Entertainment
Fans of the Torrente film point out, though, that its broad appeal extends even to Vox voters. In the streets of Madrid’s Salamanca neighbourhood, a well-heeled sanctuary for the party’s supporters, Jaime Jimenez, a 23-year-old student, said that in spite of being a Vox voter, “I thought it was brilliant. The Torrente films are the best Spanish ones ever made.” He added: “Everyone in the cinema, of all ages, was laughing like crazy.”
Jimenez went so far as to say that the disgusting antihero, who specialises in wicked opportunism — for example robbing a food shop he happens to be in when its cashier is held up at gunpoint — holds fable-like lessons. “Torrente is chauvinistic and racist, a warning of whatever politics you adhere to, you cannot end up like him.”
He added: “What Nox transmits is how Vox appears in Spain. But then so too do the representations of the [populist-left-wing] Podemos party and the Socialists. I think it is a clear message about what all the politicians are up to — doing badly.”
Segura has built the Torrente series around caricatures of social and political life since the first film, Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (“Torrente, The Dumb Arm of The Law”), came out in 1998. The latest and sixth instalment pushes the satire further by placing the character directly at the centre of national politics, turning an election campaign trail into a string of gags about populism, media spectacle and the personalities who dominate Spanish public life.
It features Mariano Rajoy, a former Spanish prime minister, as himself, Alec Baldwin as President Trump and Kevin Spacey as the villain.
Alec Baldwin in his cameoSONY PICTURES INTERNATIONAL
The political tone has fuelled a debate about whether the film mocks particular parties or the political class as a whole. Segura has affirmed that his film attacks all political sides equally. “We are a country with a strong sense of solidarity, which is why this polarisation that politicians force upon us — and the ‘you’re just as bad’ attitude — hurts me all the more,” he said.
“We need to get politicians to relax a bit, to be a little more serious,” Segura told Spanish media. “They’re losing the trust of the Spanish people. And I think politics is very important. They can’t lose the public’s trust. They have to make us trust the bloke we’ve put in there.”
Vox supporters at a rally in Madrid in SeptemberPABLO BLAZQUEZ DOMINGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES
He pointed out that one of the film’s characters turns up at a left-wing rally and a right-wing rally with the same speech and is carried out in triumph on people’s shoulders at both.
Some deem the film’s humour to be nationally unifying and its depiction of Spain more real than satirical. Ramón Pérez-Maura, the opinion editor of the conservative online newspaper El Debate, said: “The film’s huge popularity suggests that we are witnessing a sociological phenomenon. It captures the Spain so typical of Torrente. Being in a cinema with an audience that laughs equally at the satire directed at Vox and at Sánchez seems to me to show that attempts to impose polarisation in Spain have not yet fully succeeded.”