| PAN'S LABYRINTH El Laberinto del Fauno |
 2006 - Mexico / Spain / USADirector: Guillermo Del Toro
- Reviewed by Anna
Pan’s Labyrinth doesn’t have to provoke a minor emotional breakdown, but this was one of the most powerful films I have seen in ages. Billed as a horror-stricken fairy tale woven into a Socialist vs. Fascist conflict in 1944 Spain, it was a whole lot more about a nasty war than I expected. However, when I say "war" in the context of "magic", don’t think Lord of the Rings-style heroes-versus-the-Orcs thing. And certainly don’t think Harry Potter. By war I mean a brutal, pointless struggle where the vulnerable get slaughtered, where some peasant gets stabbed in the face until he dies, and where one of the nicest bits is when the Doctor gives a lethal injection to a rebel who has spent the night having his hand mutilated by the evil tyrant of a Fascist army captain (Sergi López). The film shuttles between this brutal, nerve-wracking war conflict and the fairy-tale fantasy world of a little girl named Ofelia, played by Ivana Baquero. Her mother (Ariadna Gil) has brought her into the woodland settlement where her stepfather, Capitán Vidal (Lopez), reigns supreme as the Fascist military commander in a small mountain outpost. His job is to wipe out a band of rebels living in the forest, a task he performs with maximum brutality. Shut out by her tyrannical stepfather, watching her mother deteriorate through a difficult pregnancy, and caught in the midst of an ugly war, it’s not surprising that the eight-year-old wants to live somewhere else. So she creates this potent fairy world out of old stones, chalk, stick-insects, and her story-books. One night, Ofelia creeps out of her sick mother’s bed, wanders outside, and follows a grasshopper-cum-fairy into a labyrinth and down a gaping overgrown well. There she meets Pan, who's fearsome and creaky, with a flat, carved, wooden face. Ofelia has three tasks to complete in order to become a fairy princess, and sets about them with a strange desperate compulsion. As her stepfather leads patrols out into the forest, she is forcing herself down mud pits, facing some eyeless child-eater, and drawing her own blood in strange concoctions with goat’s milk. The two storylines are schematic when you consider them: the war story of a bastard army leader and desperate but big-hearted rebels; and the fairy tale, where a child is charged with completing magic tasks in order to become the fairy princess. But everything was so intense that I was too busy wincing with fear to let a plot cliché bother me. This little, vulnerable child in a new dress wanders around this warped and horrifying magic world, but no matter what saggy-necked monsters she meets, the horrific fairy tale is actually a nice alternative to the human one outside. So the moment when the magic suddenly falters and collides with reality is absolutely desolating. There’s just this shot of a little girl in the dark, by herself, talking to nothing. This was when I started crying. And then it gets worse… Del Toro’s previous films include the WWII-era ghost story The Devil's Backbone and Cronos, an allegorical vampire tale set in Mexico. The man has obviously got a taste for the Gothic and its emotionally hyped, more-is-more ethos. Why just have one brutal death, when you can have five? Or why simply be content with one repulsive monster, when you can also have second, even more repulsive monster? Without eye-sockets. We’re not talking understatement here—De Toro likes taking things to extremes. Capitán Vidal is not just bad, but a first-order sadist. The vulnerable are a tender mass of torturable flesh. Even the soundtrack is accentuated: creaks, insect wings, a child’s breathing, the dribbling stammer of a torture victim were all rendered extra-lusciously sharp—taking over from the floating lullaby-influenced score. Del Toro sure took me to an extreme as well. Brutal in the extreme, with a high emotional impact, Pan's Labyrinth still managed to be an attractive film. This film has been called an adult fairy tale—and it's a dark, gory reminder of why adults need fairy tales. |
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Any critical account I give of this movie will be colored by the fact that I left the cinema sobbing uncontrollably and clutching my mother’s arm.
