The Last Circus makes Pan’s Labyrinth look like Sesame Street

Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast), The Last Circus is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes Pan’s Labyrinth look like Sesame Street. In the middle of the Spanish Civil War (circa 1937) and his own performance, a circus clown in drag is interrupted by a militia, given a machete and unwillingly enlisted to slaughter the Nationals outside. Later, from prison, he commands his young son/apprentice, Javier, to play the “sad clown,” since, robbed of his childhood, he’s better equipped for revenge than for making anyone laugh. In post-prologue 1973, the end days of Franco’s regime, a grown Javier (Jorge Clemente, looking uncannily like Judah Friedlander sans hat) has joined a Madrid bigtop as the metaphorically gallant common man and literally greasepaint-slathered scapegoat to a drunkenly sadistic “happy clown” boss (Antonio de la Torre, standing in for fascist authoritarianism), whose acrobat lover (Carolina Bang) would then be the masochistic motherland nursing a sick co-dependency. The ensuing love triangle and whimsically lurid horror eventually dilute the analogy, but the machine-gun-toting, vertigo-inducing, dually disfigured clowno-a-clowno climax alone is one of the nuttiest sequences to invade theaters this year.