Review of The Last Circus (2010) by Garrett R — 04 Sep 2012

THE LAST CIRCUS is a completely bonkers and extremely well-crafted film on the legacy of revenge during and after the Spanish Civil War as well as a melodramatic love-triangle phantasmagoria filled with hardcore violence, sex and passion.

Writer/director Alex de la Iglesia has dreamed up an amazingly original film in any regard that can't be compared to or differentiated from any circus or love triangle-melodrama that has come before it. Perhaps Tod Browning's 1932 B&W classic FREAKS, but you catch my meaning. Instead, this heady brew of all things crazy and scary, with gun-toting and disfigured clowns involved, knows no bounds in telling its deftly told tale with true cinema verite and an amazing sense of time and place that never overwhelms or detracts from the film's sense of deranged cinematic lyricism. The outlandish circumstances the tragic and anti-heroes of THE LAST CIRCUS find themselves in ground the film in realism, as disbelieving as that may seem. It is as if their fictitious tale was integrated in the tumultuous year of 1973 in Spain.

Picture a film such as this: think WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (the novel) with its passionate love triangle, a dash of Quentin Tarantino's flair for grisly violence in KILL BILL, a pinch of the cinematography seen in PAN'S LABYRINTH and finally the fast pace of a Paul Verhoeven film, with his usual film niches: sex and violence. That nut-so concoction would come close to describing THE LAST CIRCUS, but not quite.

Every actor embodies their role with relish and relatable realism in the attentive close-ups Iglesia gives the actors to express their characters' very real, yet sometimes very dangerous emotions. Carlos Areces, who plays the lead role of Javier the sad clown, gives his character a mighty make-over/arc from a impulsively passive clown in love with a sadistic circus's ringleader Sergio's (Antonio de la Torre) squeeze Natalia (Carolina Bang) who happens to beat her and anyone he suspects is seeing or making love to her, to a impulsively dangerous psychopath clown whose love for Natalia has driven him mad, as well as his utter hatred towards Sergio.

THE LAST CIRCUS is an acqiured taste specifically tailed for moviegoers accustomed to violent or off-beat foreign films along with foreign film enthusiasts with a penchant for dark stories and even darker thematic elements: murder, lust, psychosis, revenge, and hardcore sexuality.

One could say that Alex de la Iglesia's film is too much to handle, or too bonkers to be considered real cinema. While that statement may be true, that, my friends, is an honest mistake to make in judging THE LAST CIRCUS. Even though THE LAST CIRCUS is more grindhouse-oriented than a regular film, the point is is that THE LAST CIRCUS is everything but a regular film. And how often do films as original or well-crafted as THE LAST CIRCUS come to cinemas nowadays?

Lastly, one could imagine Paul Verhoeven directing this film if it was originally based in America. His trademarks of hardcore sex and bloody violence can be seen here, as well as striking cinematography exaggerated in aberrational color that brings out the best and worst qualities in THE LAST CIRCUS's characters. Plus the music of Roque Baños adds an extra texture to the film's ominous and off-kilter tone. THE LAST CIRCUS qualifies as a solid recommendation to any connoisseur in foreign films or Quentin Tarantino/Paul Verhoeven-tinged films filled with hardcore violence and sex.