A circus, two clowns, one ballerina, a blood-and-bullets-riddled love triangle, and lots of dark humour. The Tarantino-headed jury gave The Last Circus Best Screenplay and Best Director awards, Venice Film Festival 2010.
Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented...
Screened as part of NZIFF 2011
The Last Circus 2010
Balada triste de trompeta
Spain’s most popular genre director Álex de la Iglesia (Day of the Beast, Ferpect Crime) is in peak form with this epic that is like some Catalan molotov cocktail of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre. Javier is an awkward teenager when his father, a clown, is sent to a labour camp: before dying, he tells Javier that he will only find love through revenge. Years on and Javier is a schlubby 30-something about to start working as a sad clown under the control of psychopathic Sergio, a happy clown with a flirtatious girlfriend called Natalia. When Javier falls for her, a chain of events begins that hurtles both men towards total annihilation. An outrageous kaleidoscopic opera of beautiful women, hyper-kinetic action, clowns, Grand Guignol gore, Hitchcockian chases and frenetic fascists, it features so many jaw-dropping moments of bravura filmmaking that viewers may suffer from post-traumatic cinematic sensurround. — AT