This is one of my favorite films ever. It's just so beautiful and sad, and I love the score (Enio Morricone and Saint-Saens). I think of it as mythic, which is why the locusts and the out-of-nowhere vaudevillians don't bother me. And yet it feels very human to me, too, because there are moments of such real emotion for all the characters. I actually said (umpty-bazillion years ago) that when it hit video, I had to get a VCR. It did, I did, and my then-husband, in one of his redeeming moments, bought it for me for Christmas.