THE LAST CIRCUS

Javier grew up in a circus, son of a sad clown who during the Spanish Civil War was called to fight and die against the Franco regime. Javier was educated with one goal only, to become a sad clown like his father, and one day he finally seems to have fulfilled his desire. The man is indeed hired in a circus to assist the funny clown Sergio, but the environment is not the most comforting, and above all Sergio turns out to be a despot, violent and excessive in his manners. Javier's situation complicates when he falls in love with Natalia, the trapeze artist, who is precisely Sergio's woman. Between the two clowns, a rivalry is thus established that soon turns into a war to the last blood. Alex de la Iglesia is a madman and his films express all his madness, both visually and narratively. But Alex de la Iglesia is a madman because he is a genius, and as we well know, often the two appellations end up coinciding. The career of this director is dotted with personal and delirious films, but always of extreme quality, with the exception of the only big production he participated in "The Oxford Murders", where, as often happens when working on commission, that halo of madness is completely absent. For the rest, from "Azione mutante" to "Crimen Perfecto", passing through "El dia del la bestia" to "La Comunidad" we have always and only examples of anarchic and creative cinema, manifestos of great talent, true idea of unconventional cinema. And "Ballata dell’odio e dell’amore", his latest work arrived in Italy guilty with over two years delay, is perhaps the perfect synthesis and extreme confirmation of the genuine and splattered talent of De la Iglesia. "Ballata dell’odio e dell’amore" starts right away in fourth gear showing us the bizarre situation in which the staff of a circus is suddenly recruited to fight in war; surprised while performing, the clowns end up wielding bayonets and machetes while they are still made up and dressed in their work uniform and among these there is the sad clown played by Commissioner Torrente Santiago Segura, who slices Franco's men with machetes. A dazzling opening that is already a whole program, after which we are projected thirty years later, in which we find the son of that murderous clown who tries to take the same path as his father… in all senses, including rivers of blood. It is difficult to label "Ballata dell’odio e dell’amore" in a specific genre, since it ranges from war, to melodrama to horror with such nonchalance as to make the film appear something unique, a sort of mix between the least commercial Federico Fellini and Rob Zombie, full of beautiful and poetic images that alternate with splatter scenes of incredible violence. The story of the sad clown Javier, played by a brilliant Carlos Areces ("Gli amanti passeggeri"), is tinged from the beginning with epicness, creating an unprecedented mash-up of personal and collective madness. It is immediate the comparison between the idiocy of the war and the altered mental state of the characters that populate the film, introducing us to a joke war that includes soldiers with red noses and tutus. In parallel, we follow the absurd and paradoxical events of a sad clown who cannot, indeed cannot, for his own role's admission, reach happiness, so he has no choice but to abandon himself to that madness that is an integral part of the film both diegetic and extradiegetic. And his descent into the abyss is sudden and unreal, making us suspect that perhaps Javier has always been mad. The park of characters shown to us by De la Iglesia is varied and memorable, if the triangle Javier-Natalia-Sergio is exemplary, sympathetic are the types that populate the circus, from the reckless motorcyclist who cannot perform his performance, to the wise and disillusioned tamer who lost his wife crushed by his too jealous elephant. Beautiful the funeral photography that constantly tends to gray and fantastic the costumes that denote a rotten and unhealthy look for the protagonists of the story. The only thing that only partially convinces is some passage of the screenplay because if on one hand we can easily accept the sudden slide into the madness of the protagonist, on the other hand it seems pretextual or poorly exploited his second fortuitous encounter with Colonel Salcedo, moreover you can notice at the beginning of the last act a rather hasty passage that almost makes you suspect that there has been some cut. Anyway "Ballata dell’odio e dell’amore" is a unique film, beautiful in its wanting to be "other" always and anyway, so full of inventiveness and seemingly unpopular choices for a large audience. And then seeing a desperate clown is perhaps the most ironic thing there is. Among the many awards received, "Ballata dell’odio e dell’amore" also won the Silver Lion in Venice for the direction of De la Iglesia; today distributed on DVD and Blu Ray disc by CG Home Video and Mikado.