Pan's Labyrinth
dir. Guillermo del Toro
Picturehouse
There's a certain segment of the moviegoing audience that has no interest in fantasy. Fairies and things with eyeballs stuck in the middle of their hands just don't have the worthiness of a story built on history, that bedrock of civilization. So how would such a moviegoer (for instance, this reviewer) take to writer/director Guillermo del Toro's effort to combine both of these elements — the eyeball guy and an historical backstory — for Pan's Labyrinth, a fable set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War? I walked out dumbfounded, marvelling at the filmmakers' success in weaving together myth and history, and I'm not the only one: The movie has been nominated for six Academy Awards, surprisingly beating out Pedro Almodóvar's Volver in the Best Foreign Language Film category. These nominations are no fluke.
What allows Pan's Labyrinth to stand out is the seemingly effortless way in which the director connects the dots between the chaos, confusion and horror of war and these same elements manifested in a young girl's personal imaginings of war: Her fantastic meanderings clearly represent the trouble and unease of her daily life, but del Toro leads the audience to this conclusion gently, without overworking the metaphor. The movie, however, is anything but gentle — in both fantasy and reality, violence is ever-present.
Set in 1944, in the thick of a post-Civil War Spain where the Fascists are definitively in power yet the Republican opposition still holds out hope for intervention from abroad, Pan's Labyrinth takes place in a remote military outpost. As the Fascists dole out meager rations to nearby villagers, brusquely declaring their bread to be the superior dictator's bread, resistance bands of recently defeated Republican soldiers have occupied the surrounding hills, aided by sympathizers hidden among the ranks of the Fascist camp. The resulting conflict looks much more like war than postwar.
Into this tightly controlled atmosphere arrives the young Ofelia and her mother, who is pregnant with the Fascist Capitan's only son. Ofelia's father was killed in the war, most likely fighting for the other side, and she is immediately aware of her unwelcome presence amid the Fascists, especially after her mother is confined to undisturbed bed rest. What could have been a rather cliché story about a young girl escaping the hardships of her life into a world of the fantastic is instead a beautifully rendered tale of obstacles met and challenges failed. In a labyrinth built into the nearby forest, Ofelia encounters the Faun (the half goat/half man Pan of the film's English title), who promises that she will assume her rightful post as princess of a faraway kingdom should she complete a series of task involving an enjoyable assortment of giant frogs, insect fairies, giant skeleton keys and the aforementioned creepy guy with eyeballs in his hands.
As much as Ofelia wishes to retreat into her fantastic duties, the reality of her situation — of her mother's worsening condition, of the increasing risk those inside the Fascist base are facing to aid the resistance fighters in the hills, and of the mounting death toll as both sides clash with more frequency — is inescapable. Del Toro, who went down this fantasy/reality road before in The Devil's Backbone, another thriller set amid the horrors and hardships of the Spanish Civil War, deftly mounts the tension in the film, bleeding Ofelia's rush to complete tasks that become more and more difficult into the augmenting vitriolic cruelty of the Capitan as his control over his wife and his defenses become irretrievably compromised.
Pan's Labyrinth builds to a crescendo of violence and heartbreak that stands fast to its base in the reality of history: every cold-blooded murder and torture tactic enacted by the Capitan is displayed in such stark terms that one has to imagine they were ripped straight out of a volume on the wartime history of Spain. But the film also holds onto the escapist flights and tumult inherent in a girl who has been won over by a fantastic otherworld that even in its darkness and danger is a better alternative than what she's experiencing in real life. The fusion of myth and history that del Toro creates throughout the film comes to a head in the beautiful climactic scene — the film's nominations for costume and makeup are well-deserved both for the creatures that inhabit Pan's realm and the bleak figures of wartime Spain — that bows neither to a happy nor a bleak ending.
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It's curious that this movie, along with The Devil's Backbone, were shot in Spain by a Mexican director (Pan's Labyrinth is a co-production of Mexico and Spain): Spain's literature has been spinning these kinds of fantastic histories for years, but the country's film industry has stuck to mainly poignant depictions of Spain's Civil War and postwar dictatorship that strive above all for accuracy. What a pleasure, then, to see a director like del Toro find a way to tell a story that embraces historical accuracy but plays with imaginative elements; perhaps it takes someone outside the world of Spain's still-contentious interpretations of history to look at this era from a new angle. In Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro achieves a gut-wrenchingly realistic yet delightfully magical tale that is deeply satisfying to both history and fantasy buffs alike.
— Sara J. Brenneis (sara at flakmag dot com)
