Robert Benchley once divided the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not. Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, Satyricori) is firmly in the first category. In his new film, The Clowns, Fellini separates mankind into two classic species of fool: Pierrot and Auguste. Pierrot is the familiar circus clown in floppy white and conical hat, elegant and haughty. The clown Auguste is an eternal tramp, crumpled, drunken and rebellious.
No man escapes. Picasso and Einstein, says Fellini in a published exegesis of the film, are Augustes. Middle-class parents are Pierrots; their children Augustes. Hitler: a white clown. Mussolini: an Auguste. Freud: a white clown. Jung: an Auguste.
Fellini's 14th film, like all of the maestro's visual operas, is a flamboyant search for self. This time he prowls the enchanted place of his youth, the circus, but the spectacle of childish memory is a specter to the mature man. The circus has changed or vanished, the clown acts are,diminished beyond recognition.
But on a Fellini journey, reality is only a pebble in the shoe. He turns the world into his circus and, in a liberated, quasi-documentary style, resurrects some of history's great pagliacci with their cornucopia of practical jokes, smashed hats, pulled chairs, popping balloons and squirting flowers. Fellini's pretense is to restore the icons of his youth for the pleasure of today's children, but beyond the easy delights is a philosophy clearly aimed at adults.
From time to time, the camera breaks away from the center ring to inspect clowns in senescence, brittle little men who recall Falstaff's lament: "How ill white hairs become a fool." In the midst of unabashed gaiety, Fellini ushers in bitterness: an Italian lion tamer who trains his beasts in German because "it is the only human language that they understand." The film's zenith is a funeral staged con brio—the spectacular obsequies of a clown, his hearse drawn by men in horse suits, his widow a clown with pendulous breasts, the orator a grotesque who maligns the deceased (suffocated by an ostrich egg at the tender age of 200) as vile and worthless.
Here Fellini insists on the last laugh. If the human condition is a melancholy joke, he implies, then death is its punch line and hilarity the only proper response. The film maker pretends to have no "message" in The Clowns; when an actor asks him the meaning of his film, a bucket drops over the director's head in mid-reply. But absurdity itself is a commentary. It is also the perpetual delight of this indelible, grieving comedy in which the viewers, Pierrots and Augustes all, are the stars.