‘Fading Grandeur’ Netflix Review: Antonio de la Torre and Alexandra Jiménez Make a Charming Odd Couple in a Light Spanish Comedy of Errors

Love doesn’t exist. It’s a swindle for the poor,” says Don Leandro (Antonio de la Torre), a marquis fallen on hard times and buried in debt who wants his daughter to marry the son of another aristocrat, one in a far better financial position than his own. His reasoning, obviously, has nothing to do with romance, and not strictly with money either. What he dreams of is becoming a Grandee of Spain, a historic distinction of the Spanish nobility that carries special prestige within his class. Love, he tells his bewildered daughter, has nothing to do with it.

Conchi (Alexandra Jiménez) feels the same way. She lives in a working-class neighborhood on the city’s outskirts and passes herself off as a certain Sofía Carrington, a millionaire oil executive. She worms her way into Leandro’s life with the (phony) intention of buying his house, though what she’s really after is a way to use him to upgrade her own lifestyle. The innocent, somewhat dim-witted nobleman has no idea he’s being played. But Conchi/Sofía hasn’t figured out something either: the man is flat broke, and he lives far more off the pension of his butler Fidel, and off renting the mansion out for commercials and porn shoots, than off any money he generates himself, which is none.

That mix-up, compounded by the pressure of the daughter’s potential wedding and the outlay it would demand of the father of the bride, is what drives Fading Grandeur, a pleasant comedy of errors that leans on its string of misunderstandings across six short episodes to assemble an unexpected romantic comedy. Given how thin the story is, this could easily have been a feature film. The serial format stretches it out a little, but it barely alters the structure.

The creative duo, who have worked together and separately in both television and film, adopt a fairly traditional register, rooted in a certain strain of Spanish picaresque and built on classic stereotypes and oppositions. They use it to pair an outdated aristocrat still dreaming of a pomp and circumstance that no longer exists with a woman who, in her own way, also lives in a world of old fantasies: gossip magazines and the imaginary of the rich and famous. Neither has the life they want, and that is precisely what sparks the meeting, the confusion and the more or less predictable romance that follows.

De la Torre, as usual, handles the comic register of his naive character with ease, a man who lives almost completely detached from reality. Jiménez has the more complex role, since she is, in a sense, playing two different people. Her Sofía begins and ends whenever she is in front of Leandro. Each time he drops her off at the luxury hotel where she claims to live, she not only slips out to catch the subway, but gradually changes her look, her attitude and even the way she walks.

Light, amiable and likable, Grande de España is an effective comedy in Netflix’s “fast food” mode, but with one foot firmly planted in classic tradition and the other in the cinema of the great Luis García Berlanga. With no aspirations or pretensions beyond passing the time pleasantly, the Spanish series gives us a pair of lovable characters who sell an aspirational fiction of themselves until they realize that the best thing they can do may be to accept each other for who they really are.