Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth was fantastic. The Dulcinea and I went to see it last night and were joined by Charles and Buke. Although I am a review behind, I'm going to talk about it since it is still fresh in my mind.

The film concerns Ofelia, a girl who looks to be just shy of her teens. The time is during the Spanish Civil War and Ofelia is being driven, along with her pregnant mother, out into the country to a military outpost where her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, is stationed. Ofelia's father had been killed in the war and her mother, Carmen, married Vidal and is now heavy with his child. During the drive there, Carmen feels uneasy and has the convoy of black sedans stop so she can get out and walk around a bit. Ofelia wanders away from the cars and finds a stone with some kind of picture engraved in it. She walks some more and finds this big, upright stone that is ornately carved. There is a face on it and it is missing an eye. Ofelia places the rock she found into it and makes the face whole again. We viewers waited for something to happen and something did – a large bug crawled out of the mouth. The convoy gets moving again but the bug follows.

Back at the outpost, Vidal is angry that they are 15 minutes late. He is disdainful of Ofelia and only slightly warmer towards Carmen. He seems more concerned about the unborn child which Vidal is sure is a boy. We also meet Mercedes, the Captain's servant, and Dr. Ferreiro. It turns out both are aiding the Loyalists who are hiding out in the woods nearby. Ofelia meets up with the bug again in the middle of the night and it turns into a fairy, just like the one pictured in her book of fairy tales. It leads her out to a labyrinth behind the farmhouse which has a large hole in the center with stairs leading down. Ofelia makes treads the stairs to the bottom where she meets an eldritch faun who tells her that she is really Princess Moanna, daughter of the King of the Underworld. She is lost in the world of mortals and, in order to return home, she must perform 3 labors. These take Ofelia underneath a giant tree where she must retrieve a golden key from the stomach of a giant frog and to an encounter with a hideous creature of pale skin that barely hangs onto its boney frame and whose eyes are on the palms of its hands. And it eats babies.

As Ofelia adventures in her wonderland, Carmen's pregnancy takes turns for the worse and Captain Vidal gets wind of traitors in his midst. While the creatures that Ofelia encounters are scary, it is Vidal that is the true horror. For example, a patrol captures an old man and his son thinking that they are Loyalists. Vidal sorts out the situation by discovering that they are just as they claimed – hunters looking for food. But he shoots both of them dead and not before smashing the younger man's face in. Cinderella suffered at the hands of an evil stepmother but here the gender is reversed.

While Carmen insists that Ofelia is too old for fairy tales, Pan's Labyrinth is certainly one of the old school variety, in addition to being a film for adults. Long before Disney, "Little Red Riding Cap" was eaten by the wolf; "Goldilocks" was an old crone who intruded upon the bears' home and paid for this by being impaled on a church steeple; and in some versions of "Sleeping Beauty", the prince rapes our heroine as she slumbers and Sleeping Beauty is awakened by one of her infants suckling at her breast. Pan's Labyrinth uses enchantment in the same way as some of the old school tales – to describe the ascent into adulthood. I don't know much about director Guillermo del Toro, but I suspect that he is a fan of fairy tales. The film is self-referential in that, not only is it a fairy tale, but it also examines them from the outside. Ofelia may be forced to lose the innocence of her childhood because of circumstances beyond her control, but she summons the courage to overcome adversity and the strength to make the transition from a fairy tale.

Being an ignorant American, I am sure that there were things that I missed because I am not Spanish and don't speak the language. In addition, I am woefully ignorant of all but the most basic elements of the Spanish Civil War. Conceding this, the film noticeably didn't try to hit the viewer over the head with allegory and or make any obvious allusions to the present day.

Bruno Bettelheim is famous for his analyses of fairy tales through a Freudian lens. So, for example, when the color red appears in "Snow White", he argues that it is a metaphor for blood, keeping in mind menarche. While I don't think del Toro has constructed a film around such an approach to fairy tales, I do think that he put a lot of food for thought into his movie. For instance, take Captain Vidal. Besides being a cruel, sadistic bastard, he is also an embodiment of masculinity or at least a vision of it. He is certain that Carmen will give birth to a boy, allowing him to pass down his and his father's name; although he denies a story about his father wherein the man broke his watch so that Vidal would know what time he died, the captain still carries that watch. And he looks at the watch frequently. Is it merely because he wants to know the time? Or is he looking for a reminder of his father? Perhaps Vidal is fatalistic. Regardless, Vidal as a character embodies notions of father & son and is a parallel to Ofelia. Where Ofelia is moving from child to adult, Vidal is moving from son to father. Pan's Labyrinth is really the story of Ofelia *and* Vidal.

I am reminded of George Steiner's 5 "constants of conflict in the condition of man" when I think about this: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). While Steiner wrote about how they are embodied in Greek tragedy, I think they're applicable here as well.

Pushing all the theorizing away, Pan's Labyrinth was simply a touching, well-crafted story. The acting was excellent and the photography suitably eerie. Director Guillermo del Toro and the film deserve all the accolades they have received. Go see it as soon as you can.