Word: clowning
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...Apple is different. The scale is much smaller: A clown at ground level can throw an inflated beach ball to the top row, and the ring is just three and one-half elephant lengths across. The audience remains seated except during intermission. The air is well circulated, and there is a noticeable lack of circus smell. You are close enough to the action so that in slow moments you consider what percentage of the ticket price goes for liability insurance. With the lights lowered, you share with the performers a living-room intimacy...
...Apple parades the usual assortment of acts. There are horse tricks, clowns, acrobats and a band. This array has changed surprisingly little in two hundred years. In 1770, Philip Astley, a skilled equestrian who could ride balanced on his head, brought together in one ring "Chinese Shadows, Tumbling, Slack-Rope Vaulting, Egyptian Pyramids" and a clown named Burt. Flocks of Londoners paid a shilling to see the show, the first modern circus...
...them, there no wonder in the tightrope walk and no humor in the clown routines. The elephant smelled, cotton candy jacked up the dental bills and little glowing blue-and-red flashlight gadgets cluttered up the house...
Allen compensates for the grim premise by offering an array of characters as a source of comedy. For example, a sword swallower (Mia Farrow) leaves her clown-lover (John Malkovich) after catching him with the fortune-teller (Madonna). She finds shelter with a bunch of prostitutes (Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Lily Tomlin) and winds up getting paid for sex by John Cusack...
...piggy butcher serves chopped humans to his customers -- who may soon be his victims. A housewife bent on suicide rigs up a dozen Rube Goldberg devices of destruction. Underground, an army of inept "Troglodists" (sort of Middle- Age Mutant Dingy Frogmen) plots revolution. And a nice guy in clown shoes hopes the butcher's myopic daughter will see the goodness in his heart. Part circus, part zoo, the film's milieu is a nice metaphor for the rudderless morals of post-Everything Europe. Writer-directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro go in your face with baroque camera angles...