Around The World In 24 Reels

Part 1 - Estado Espanol

Both Anj and I love traveling around the world, by which I mean we love lazing on our couch and traveling vicariously through world cinema. We’ve trudged across parched African deserts, run frenetically through dingy Mexican alleyways, wandered aimlessly through neon-laced Tokyo districts and strolled across historic European plazas, all the while munching on a slightly soggy, comfortably familiar piece of Domino’s Pizza (consider this an official endorsement of their artery clogging creations). So I thought I’d share some of our adventures with our readers, in what we like to call ‘Around The World In 24 reels’. First stop – Franco-era Spain…

There is something about a nation facing its grim past that often makes for truly affecting cinema. One country where this has produced more than its fair share of internationally acclaimed films is Spain and its filmmakers’ fascination with the effects of General Franco’s regime on its citizens. A full compilation requires film snobbery far beyond our limited abilities (for starters, see Bad Education, Live Flesh, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone and The Last Circus), but the ones that really stood out to me in the crowd were the two that took the horrific reality of living through a Civil War that claimed several hundred thousand lives, and an oppressive regime that executed tens of thousands more, and used it to create morbid fantasy worlds that their central protagonists can escape to, taking us along for a frightening ride.

Pan’s Labyrinth

Set in the early days of Franco’s reign, Guillermo Del Toro’s dark fantasy tells the story of young Ofelia, a precocious girl with a vivid imagination, who travels to the Spanish countryside with her pregnant mother and her vicious stepfather, a Fascist captain tasked with rooting out the local rebels. As the real world around her gets increasingly violent and brutal, Ofelia finds herself retreating into a magical, often dangerous world of her own, nestled within an unkempt garden by her house that only she can see.

To the casual, cynical eye, Pan’s Labyrinth can easily come across as a classic example of overrated art-house wankery, ornate visuals that serve little purpose other than to let the director indulge in saturated multicolor excess (and many an online armchair critic will nod in grave acknowledgement). But to my untrained eye, the film is a visual treat, classic Del Toro set pieces of intricate, often unsettling beauty, with none of the commercial shackles that restrained his more crowd pleasing Hollywood offerings (Hellboy, Blade II, etc.). Using his considerable clout to muster up a fairly rich budget, Del Toro crafts a mesmerizing, brilliantly staged, competently acted and hauntingly scored fairy tale that refuses to be straitjacketed by convention. It’s too gruesome for kids, but might be too childish for adults. It’s a tad longer than most family films, but too short to be a fantasy epic. It is, to quote another dark fairytale, ‘just right’. Highly recommended for anyone who likes to see cinema used as a visual art form rather than a simple storytelling device, and/or who has only heard of Del Toro as ‘that fat dude who made Hellboy’.

The Last Circus

Show me a movie that begins with a crazed clown hacking down an entire army platoon with a rusty machete and ends with a midget crashing a motorcycle into a giant Cross, and I’ll show you Alex De La Iglesia’s The Last Circus. Following a sad circus clown through three decades of Franco’s regime as he comes to terms with love, loss and life, the film is a hyperkinetic assault on the senses that is bound to leave even seasoned consumers of on-screen violence a little exhausted.

The first half is very engaging, setting up the bizarre fantasy world of the traveling circus within the much grimmer reality of war-weary Franco-era Spain. We follow Javier from his adolescent life as he watches his father turn from circus clown to rampaging murderer to political prisoner, through to his adult life as a socially awkward circus clown who falls in love with beautiful, masochistic trapeze artist Natalia, and subsequently ends up on the wrong side of her sadistic, hot-tempered husband Sergio, the ‘Happy clown’ and star of the circus. Near the halfway mark, things come to a boil when Sergio violently confronts Javier about his relationship with Natalia, and suffice to say things go pretty batshit insane pretty quickly. Iglesia turns the weird-o-meter up to 11 and subjects the audience to an orgy of unprecedented violence and unrelenting mayhem once Javier and Sergio both start to lose their minds in pursuit of Natalia’s love.

I have mixed feelings about this film. While it is a distant second to Pan’s Labyrinth on all levels (in my mind at least), it is nonetheless a brave, relentlessly engaging, visceral movie with a very unique, if somewhat bizarre, visual style that takes ‘horror comedy’ to a new level. Plus, I have to admit that while I have not seen any of Iglesia’s other movies, watching The Last Circus definitely made me want to see more of his work. On the other hand, the film is, on many levels, an exercise in overindulgent hyperweirdness. The plot quickly veers from interesting to strange to just plain ridiculous as the movie progresses, until it becomes nothing more than a convenient device to stage another grandiose, purposefully bizarre set piece, and the violence, through its sheer pointlessness, reduces segments of the movie to little more than elaborate torture porn (with clowns!). Recommended for anyone who thinks Water For Elephants needed more drugs, or that Trainspotting did not have enough clowns in it. Highly discouraged if watching insane, sadistic, disfigured clowns charging at you with machetes and submachine guns isn’t your cup of tea (Coulrophobics, you’ve been warned).

- S