A browbeaten ad exec capitalizes on his own misfortune in 2011’s As Luck Would Have It.
Collecting his Oscar for Best Actor in 1999, Italian comedian-filmmaker Roberto Benigni began his rambling, quasi-coherent acceptance speech with a telling admission: "This is a terrible mistake!" He was right. And not just because Nick Nolte was robbed.
Benigni was being feted for Life Is Beautiful, his vile Holocaust mockery in which he plays a buffoonish dad helping his son suffer life in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending their internment is just an elaborate game. It was, and remains, a mawkish, awful "triumph of the human spirit" type of film, which effectively treated its audience like the small boy in the film: doe-eyed children unequipped to confront the Holocaust head-on. The universal acclaim Life Is Beautiful received sent a dispiriting message. As long as it's garishly sentimentalized and shot through with noxious feel-goodery, it's okay to clown about the horrors of history.
The Last Circus, Spanish cult filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia's loosely historical tragicomic nightmare from 2010, offers a bloody, vital, punch-in-the-gut corrective to Benigni's feel-good farce. The film opens in 1937, midway through the Spanish Civil War, with a small circus troupe forcibly recruited to fight against Francisco Franco's fascist insurrection. A squat, cross-dressed clown is armed with a machete and sent howling into gory combat – a grim, terrifying, totally ridiculous image of the war's brother-versus-brother hostilities.
Years later, the conscripted clown's son has taken up the mantle, performing as the depressed, loveless, pathetic Sad Clown in a low-rent Madrid circus in the last days of Generalissimo Franco's regime. In The Last Circus, the clown makeup isn't a shield or security blanket, but a way of living in continuity with the past; with its violence and grotesquerie, its governing absurdity.
At first wince, a genre filmmaker such as de la Iglesia would seem an unlikely chronicler of Spain's 20th-century history of fascism, revolution and bloody, violent combat. But as the late Canadian film critic Robin Wood once wrote, schlocky, disreputable genre movies have the potential to prove "far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of serious social criticism" (like, say, Life Is Beautiful), precisely because they smuggle their subtext inside escapist fantasy. The 49-year-old de la Iglesia makes a strong case for Wood's argument, and TIFF's mid-career retrospective provides an opportunity to attend to the schlockmeister's work with a renewed level of seriousness.
Of course, there's such a thing as too serious. Despite returning to themes of politics and pastness (2013's horror-heist-comedy Witching and Bitching revisits the 17th-century Basque witch trials through the lens of contemporary male anxiety toward feminism), it would be a ludicrous, winking overstatement to make a case for de la Iglesia as some radical political filmmaker. While his high-adrenalin, comically pitiless films have long been preoccupied with those cast on the margins of society – beginning with 1993's sci-fi comedy Mutant Action (Accion Mutante), about a group of disabled people leading an uprising against the "beautiful people" – they're marked less by their abounding sympathy than their ambivalence. De la Iglesia is smart enough to realize that being an outsider doesn't necessarily excuse desperately human traits like selfishness, cruelty and out-and-out clownishness.
This spirit of ambivalence is best expressed in de la Iglesia's breakthrough, The Day of the Beast, a 1995 film about a Spanish priest on the eve of birth of the Antichrist, hellbent on committing as many sins as possible. His plan? To win Satan's favour, learn where the Antichrist is being birthed, then slay it. This pattern of doing bad in order to do good, or vice-versa, pretty much defines the washed-out moral backdrops of de la Iglesia's films.
His humour is undercut by a bitterness that feels less mean-spirited than pragmatic. His characters are unbeautiful losers, who win our sympathies only to squander them again. In 2011's As Luck Would Have It, a browbeaten ad exec capitalizes on his own misfortune, spinning a media circus around his own predicament when freak accident leaves him pinned to a museum floor with a rod through his head. It's a grimly funny ode to Billy Wilder's caustic media satire Ace in the Hole (or, sure, that Simpsons episode in which Bart pretends he's trapped in a well).
De la Iglesia's forays outside of Spain have been scarce, most notably 1997's Perdits Durango (a sort of spinoff of David Lynch's Wild at Heart) and 2008's The Oxford Murders, starring Elijah Wood and possibly the most tedious serial-killer movie ever made. It's just as well. His oddball creative energies are more attuned to his native Spain: to its media and culture, to its history and hypocrisy, to its configurations of hip, hyperviolent, macho masculinity.
Yet there's universal appeal in these national allegories, in their alchemy of caustic wit, sympathy, and cynicism. For de la Iglesia, life is cruel, brutish and mostly awful, animated by self-interest and hypocrisy. Life is clownish, bizarre and grotesque – and it's sure not beautiful.
Alex de la Iglesia: Dancing with the Devil runs from Jan. 30 to March 28 at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto