It is a movie-riddle, a movie-joke, a movie-labyrinth. 4 parts and 4 travels to the sea, 4 crossed short stories: Love, Friendship, Respect and Cooperation. Heroes of each of the short stories arrive to seaside town, and go through turning fragments of their life. Fragments develop almost synchronously - someone goes mad of love, someone suffers as cannot be understood by friends, someone tries to win father's respect, and someone - to enter into cooperation with partners. As in life, when everyone sees themselves as the center of their own drama, heroes of "Chapiteau" are heroes in their own story, while in other people's stories they are sometimes hardly visible characters. Stories are full of tragic pathos - but this is the way everyone goes through personal drama, when from outside it looks even ridiculous. The more serious character is, the more comic he behaves. Love, Friendship, Respect, Cooperation - colours in which the life, its walls are painted. Going from one strip to another we often do not notice that we run in circles, we live the same situations, we say the same words. And sometimes we find it hard to notice the border between what is happening "in fact" and a chapiteau-show. The film employed professional, semi-professional and amateur actors.
—SVOI 2000