“If you look for me, you will find me,” announces a billboard outside the apartment inhabited by a young man named Santos (Miguel Ortiz). The billboard also features a picture of a woman who appears to be beckoning whoever is viewing her. When Santos steps out of his apartment, he stares at the billboard. Later, under far different circumstances, he asks, “What was I supposed to find?”
Santos is an aspiring musician who lives in post-Franco Spain. At a performance, he sees another man flirting with his girlfriend. Suddenly, Santos finds himself standing in front of the man with blood on his hands. The man has been stabbed. There’s never any doubt that Santos killed the man, but the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether the murder was an act of impulse or calculation.
Santos spends two years in prison before he’s paroled. On his first night out, he meets a prostitute named Lola (Giannina Facio) and goes to a mansion with her. The next morning, he has breakfast with four old, rich men who tell Santos that they want to hunt him. If he can escape the grounds of the mansion, he will have a million dollars’ worth of gems to start a new life with. When Santos says that he’s not interested in being hunted, the men reply that he doesn’t really have a choice.
The thing that one notices is that Santos rarely shows any emotion. Whether he’s just killed a man or been informed that he’s going to be hunted, Santos is pretty much a blank. Even when he learns that one of the men who will be hunting him is also the father of the person he killed, Santos seems to shrug it off. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the acting limitations of Miguel Ortiz. But as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Santos is as much of a hollow shell as the decadent men who are hunting him. If Santos seems empty, that’s because he is empty. The hunters, who obviously expected him to be easy prey, instead find themselves up against a sociopath who is just as determined as they are to get revenge. What began as just another rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game instead becomes a look into the world of absolute zero. There is no empathy, guilt, warmth, or mercy. The billboard invites the viewer to “find me,” but there is nothing to find.
Released in 1984, Poppers is a Spanish film and, to understand it, it helps to know a little about Spanish history. General Francisco Franco was the head of the Spanish government from 1936 to 1975. (My grandmother was born in Spain and came to the United States shortly after World War II. Growing up, I was usually the only kid in class to have encyclopedic knowledge of General Franco.) Franco died in 1975, nine years before Poppers was released. After being ruled for nearly forty years by one man, Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to a more democratic system was not always an easy or smooth one, especially with Franco himself having been such a controversial figure. In Poppers, the hunters are the type of older rich men who presumably did what they had to do to thrive under Franco’s regime. (At least two of the hunters are gay, which was illegal in Francoist Spain, leaving one to wonder what they did to remain free and rich while so many others were being imprisoned or exiled.) Santos and Lola represent the next generation, the one that grew up largely without Franco. When they go after the hunters, they can be seen to represent the youth sweeping away the remains of Franco’s Spain. However, since neither Santos nor Lola are motivated by any ideology beyond their own self-preservation, the message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Santos and Lola are not class warriors and they’re not political dissidents. They’re two people who are as empty as the people they’re replacing.
Poppers is an interesting and always watchable film. At times, the film’s imagery borders on the surreal. Director José María Castellví had a good eye for decadence. Ultimately, though, it’s a film that leaves you feeling uneasy. The closest thing the film has to a hero is a sociopath who takes a bit too much joy in killing. (The fact that all of the people he kills are bad does not make his demented smile any less unsettling.) The billboard asks us to look, but all we see is a world defined by absolute zero.
