General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Last Circus

The Last Circus (original title Balada triste de trompeta, also released as A Sad Trumpet Ballad) is a 2010 Spanish-French dark comedy-horror film written and directed by Álex de la Iglesia. It follows Javier and Sergio, two disfigured circus clowns, as they battle over an acrobat, both surviving the final confrontation while Natalia dies, during the final years of Francisco Franco's regime, after a prologue set in the Spanish Civil War.¹^•²^•²¹ The film competed at the 67th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Osella for Best Screenplay.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Balada triste de trompeta, Spain and France, 2010¹
Director and writer	Álex de la Iglesia, his first screenplay without regular co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría¹^•⁴
Principal cast	Carlos Areces (Javier), Antonio de la Torre (Sergio), Carolina Bang (Natalia), Santiago Segura (the happy clown), Sancho Gracia (Colonel Salcedo)²
Venice 2010	Silver Lion for Best Director and Osella for Best Screenplay³
Goya Awards 2011	Best Make-up and Hairstyles and Best Special Effects²
Spanish release	17 December 2010, distributed by Warner Bros. España on 300 copies²^•⁵
Worldwide gross	$3,604,598, of which $40,548 in the United States through Magnolia Pictures⁶
Critical scores	Metascore 70 (generally favorable); Rotten Tomatoes 76% from 34 reviews⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The story opens in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Republican troops burst into a circus during a children's performance and conscript the performers into their militia. The happy clown, played by Santiago Segura, is forced into battle still wearing his costume and cuts down Nationalist soldiers with a machete before being captured and sent to forced labor on the construction of the Valle de los Caídos.⁹^•¹⁰ Before his death at the hands of Colonel Salcedo (Sancho Gracia), he tells his young son Javier that, having seen too much, he will only ever be able to play the sad clown.⁴^•¹¹

By 1973, the year of the assassination of Prime Minister Carrero Blanco, the adult Javier (Carlos Areces) has become the Sad Clown in a struggling troupe led by Sergio (Antonio de la Torre), a violent, dictatorial Happy Clown who abuses his girlfriend, the trapeze artist Natalia (Carolina Bang). Javier and Natalia begin an affair, and the rivalry between the two clowns escalates into mutilation, facial disfigurement, and a media-spectacle battle that ends atop the cross of the Valle de los Caídos memorial.¹⁰^•¹¹^•¹²

Production

The film was produced by Tornasol Films (45%), Castafiore Films (45%), and the French company La Fabrique 2 (10%), with the participation of TVE, Canal+ España, and Canal+ France.² Gerardo Herrero and Mariela Besuievsky produced, with Roque Baños composing the score, Kiko de la Rica as cinematographer, and Alejandro Lázaro as editor.² Shooting ran from 18 January to 24 March 2010 in Madrid, at the Ciudad de la Luz studios in Alicante, in Valencia, and in Bocairent.²^•¹³ De la Iglesia described the project during production as "a grotesque tragedy of comic horror" and summarized it as "clowns, television and terrorism in an era when everything was on a knife's edge".⁹

It was the director's first film using digital effects. The climactic sequence on the 150-meter cross of the Valley of the Fallen was digitally rendered, since permission to film at the site was denied and the location had to be recreated in studio with extensive green screen.¹⁴ Reported running times differ by source: the ICAA production register lists 101 minutes, RTVE and the ACEprensa review 107 minutes, Cineuropa 108 minutes, and IMDb 1 hour 47 minutes.²^•¹⁵^•¹⁶^•¹^•¹⁷

Themes and reception

Critics read the film as a political allegory of Franco-era Spain, with the clowns' rivalry standing in for the country's conflicting ideologies. Nick Schager, reviewing for Slant Magazine, called it "a grotesque parable of Franco-era tyranny and opposition" and a more demented companion piece to Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.¹¹ Academic readings have placed it in the lineage of Spanish films about the Civil War and its traumatic legacy: Gina Sherriff argues the 1970s narrative is the product of the war, with the protagonists' facial injuries alluding to trauma, while Alison Ribeiro de Menezes asks whether it is "permissible to laugh at a traumatic past".¹⁸ A 2013 study by Bajonas Teixeira de Brito Junior of the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo analyzed the film through Hannah Arendt's philosophy of violence, concluding that it gradually assimilates the effects of violence into its own narrative language.¹⁹

Reception was broadly positive but divided. The New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis called it "brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented"; the Village Voice praised it as a "funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain".⁷ The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus describes it as "an uneven but winningly insane blend of hard violence, sex, black humor, and social satire", with a 76% Tomatometer and a 64% audience score.⁸ Detractors found the excess exhausting: Time Out gave three of five stars, calling it "inventive yet exhausting", and Eye for Film judged the tone inconsistent and the CGI unconvincing in the climax.¹²^•²⁰

Awards and box office

At Venice 2010, the jury led by Quentin Tarantino awarded de la Iglesia the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Osella for Best Screenplay.³^•¹⁶ At the 25th Goya Awards in 2011 the film won Best Make-up and Hairstyles and Best Special Effects, and the Sant Jordi Awards gave a shared Best Actor prize to Antonio de la Torre and Carlos Areces.²

Commercially, the film earned $3,126,895 in Spain, where it opened on 17 December 2010 with an opening weekend of $849,984, and $3,604,598 worldwide. Its United States release through Magnolia Pictures on 19 August 2011 grossed $40,548.⁶ It was later released theatrically across Europe and Latin America through 2011 and 2012, including France, Germany, Italy, Argentina, and Russia.¹ In 2026 the film received a Blu-ray debut from Radiance Films' Chasm Films label.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1998 to 2024

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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