Clowntime Is Over
by Steve Dollar 
Think clowns are funny? Do you? They're not funny at all. They are brutal fucking monsters. Behind the pancake makeup and the exaggerated swoosh of funhouse red they call lips, these circus jesters might as well be rapists, serial killers, terrorists?every peal of laughter they provoke from a delighted child a hollow lie. At least, that's how it is in
The Last Circus, which testifies long and loud that director
�lex de la Iglesia was likely molested by one of these bulbous nosed, smiley-faced nightmares as a small boy. If not, well, he's just molested
us.
This twisted historical drama, which opened this weekend in New York, certainly has the vibe of a dark, inchoate fairy tale, the telling of which guarantees emotional scar tissue. (And a rollicking, if tragic, good time.) Its Spanish title,
Balada triste de trompeta?
A Sad Trumpet Ballad?evokes a lilting, wistful tone. But there's hardly anything nostalgic in its near-riotous narrative. To some degree akin to Guillermo Del Toro's
Pan's Labyrinth, the film conflates childhood trauma/coming of age with the terrible events of the Spanish Civil War. A shy, bespectacled boy named Javier watches in terror as his father, a clown like his father before him, is involuntarily conscripted?mid-performance?into the good fight. That he is wearing a woman's wig and frock seems not to matter in the least. In fact, as they plunge headlong into slaughter, the bizarre sight of a cross-dressing Bozo whacking heads with a machete is a huge bonus. Alas, Ronald McDeath is imprisoned by Franco's army, and becomes a figure of torment for a certain general. Years later, Javier goes to see his father in prison, and gets this advice: "Revenge... revenge will make you feel better."
The seed planted, Javier takes fateful action. Decades pass, and as a grown man in 1973 (played by Carlos Areces) he's taken up the family profession. A chubby, passive, perpetual "nice guy," with giant eyeglasses framing a cherub?s face frozen in a constant state of mopery, Javier joins a fantastically ragtag circus and wins the role of the Sad Clown. Within moments of arrival, he gazes upwards at Natalia (the ever-so-aptly named Carolina Bang), the troupe's fetching sex-bomb of an aerialist, and is forever smitten. Unfortunately, as he soon learns, she's in thrall to Sergio (
Antonio de la Torre), the "Happy Clown." Sans makeup, Sergio is a short-tempered bully who?in a booze-sodden outburst at dinner?beats and kicks Natalia to a black-and-blue pulp. Javier is horrified. But when the camera gazes back her, crumpled on the floor, Natalia flicks out her snake-like tongue and catches a splash of her own blood on the tip, savoring it like honey. Later, after an effort to console her, Javier finds himself hiding in the shadows as Sergio seizes her for a bout of highly consensual and loudly violent sex. Como se dice "bizarre love triangle"?
De la Iglesia has such wicked fun with the circus scenario?juxtaposing its gaily garish primal colors with gothic sequences of the most mad and abysmal degradation and horror?that it would be criminal to get too explicit with what, all so inevitably, happens next. Everything from allusions to
Frankenstein to some kind of drug-frenzied Troma trope (Okay: a clown in Pagliacci drag armed with a machine gun assaulting a fast food franchise as a sad love ballad spins on a jukebox... happy now?) to an all-too-brief nightclub moment out of a Tarantino wet dream keeps popping onto the screen. As the story breathlessly moves ahead, its rivals behave like cartoon characters whom not even an atomic blast can destroy. They suffer like penitents the mortification of their flesh so that they might aspire to the sublime (which would be Miss Bang's department).
Amid the mayhem, staged with a keen appreciation for Spain's surrealist and gothic traditions and ratcheted up to an absinthe delirium, there's an allegory for the nation's fractured body politic?torn between the oppressive Franco and the democratic ideal. De la Iglesia thankfully doesn't belabor the point. There's only enough such framework to give some historical spark to this go-kart ride to hell, in which both male rivals are transformed into literal and figurative monsters as they profess love for a woman who seems, overall, to be rather stupendously fickle?a candy-apple avatar of va-vooming desire. This roaring psychodrama reaches its tragic spiraling climax at the pinnacle of the world's tallest cross, above the Valley of the Fallen, a Madrid memorial site where 40,000 Spanish Civil War dead are entombed. It's a helluva finale, and when it's over,
The Last Circus brings epic new meaning to Smokey Robinson's line about the tears of a clown.
Posted by ahillis at August 20, 2011 9:50 AM
