Visceral anger isn't often communicated very well in film. The tendency is to put the rabid puppy on a leash in hopes of averting alienation and discomfort, which are hardly the easiest emotional reactions to see the benefit in. To be perfectly frank, most movies that come from true outrage tend to come off as biased, cloyingly self-righteous, and political in the worst sense of the word, leading one to not only lose faith in the filmmaker but also in issues that deserve contemplation, action, and, yes, anger. The difference between a film being in your face or "in your face" is the difference between a rattlesnake and a lemon, and a film such as Alex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus is perhaps most interesting when considering where an artist's rightful fury contaminates, distorts, and ultimately degrades his formal abilities or, perhaps, highlights the limits of said abilities. This isn't to say that dissent is a new criterion for de la Iglesia, who is perhaps most well-known in the states for The Day of the Beast, which saw a priest attempting to gain the favor of Satan through a series of increasingly debauched acts in the service of ultimately killing the Anti-Christ. No less jarring in its conception, The Last Circus opens as a clown is drafted to fight for the rebellion in Franco's Spain, subsequently tearing through a battalion of soldiers with a machete in full regalia before his inevitable capture. He is later killed by one of Franco's head honchos, Salcedo (Sancho Gracia), during a daring escape staged by the clown's son, Javier, who already has plans of following in his father's oversized footsteps. A few decades later, Franco's regime is in severe decline and pudgy, side-burned Javier (Carlos Areces) has landed a not-so-sweet gig as the Sad Clown for the eponymous show, working under the Happy Clown, Sergio (Antonio de la Torre).
An egomaniacal boozer with his clown shoe pressed firmly to the ringmaster's throat, Sergio is Franco in miniature, ruling over his colleagues with his frequent, ultra-violent tantrums. Not even his lover, Natalia (Carolina Bang), is safe from his savage beatings, but, as she explains, she is addicted to his wild, carnal nature; their fights tend to be followed by feral fuck sessions, sometimes in public. But Natalia also falls hard for Javier's boldness and his lack of fear in regard to Sergio, who attempts to instill said fear with a ferocious once-over at a local carnival that leaves Javier with an aching back and a further twisted psyche. Javier answers back by bludgeoning and severely disfiguring Sergio, mid-coitus, and on goes the war between charismatic tyranny and impassioned rebellion, reaching a fever pitch when Javier deforms his own face with acid and a hot iron before embarking on a shooting spree.
De la Iglesia imparts a genuine sense of madness to the proceedings, which is deeply seductive in its willingness to toss itself into the void. But it comes at the cost of clarity, both in terms of storytelling and technical form. Working from his own script, the director seizes upon a grotesque atmosphere of gaudy embellishments, matched by grandiose set-pieces and unsettling quakes of barbarity. It is then somewhat understandable that once Javier and Sergio's visages truly mirror their mangled, monstrous insides, the narrative itself begins to come apart at the seams. At the same time, however, de la Iglesia loses control and the film's tone and pacing begin to feel like erratic fits. Save for an engaging chase between Sergio and Natalia from her Kojak-themed nightclub, the action in the film's final third is deployed sloppily and the film's urgency begins to feel more like hurrying towards its near-operatic end.
By the end, the whole mess feels only marginally effective in its political subtext but you can feel de la Iglesia's wild heart thumping like mad underneath the grimy veneer of Madrid, which appears as a charred husk after innumerable bombings and terrorist attacks. Casting the ruthless Sergio as Franco's proxy is expectedly vicious but Javier, as the brooding face of the rebellion that explodes into a scarred atrocity, is hardly more sympathetic by the film's climax in a church filled with the bones of dead rebels.
There are moments of great, caustic humor and delirious melodrama throughout The Last Circus. But as a whole, the film lacks the consistency, sorrow, and tremendous imagination of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which it has been somewhat unjustly compared to. Del Toro's magnificent fable focused almost completely on how imagination and invention serve as reactants to personal and political trauma, at once shielding us and betraying us. In contrast, The Last Circus deals more closely with memory, how we revert to and pervert learned ideals of innocence and entertainment, making them essentially hideous. De la Iglesia's unwillingness to reconcile his passion for his country's cruel heritage is effective in spurts, but it's all too familiar of tragic Javier, whose inability to come fully to terms with his past births a horror.
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