Pan's Labyrinth

[Ya Sam]

That's another film, besides Inland Empire, that I'm yearning to watch.


>From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Pan's Labyrinth
>Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 06:52:03 -0800 (PST)
>
>December 29, 2006
>MOVIE REVIEW | 'PAN'S LABYRINTH'
>In Gloom of War, a Child's Paradise
>By A.O. SCOTT
>
>Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time —
>1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the
>fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was
>painfully starting to awaken — “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a
>political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe
>it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of
>the children’s story — with its clearly marked poles
>of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and
>vindication — illuminate the nature of authoritarian
>rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible
>fairy tale brought to life?
>
>The brilliance of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is that its
>current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this
>is magic realism, it is also the work of a real
>magician. The director, Guillermo Del Toro,
>unapologetically and unpretentiously swears allegiance
>to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic
>books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy
>pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a
>thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical
>technique and film history.
>
>This Mexican-born filmmaker’s English-language,
>Hollywood genre movies — “Blade 2” (2002), “Hellboy”
>(2004) and the ill-starred but interesting “Mimic”
>(1997) — have a strangeness and intensity of feeling
>that sets them apart from others of their kind. In his
>recent Spanish-language films, “The Devil’s Backbone”
>(2001) and this new one, he uses the feverish
>inventiveness of a vulnerable child’s imagination as
>the basis for his own utterly original, seamlessly
>effective exploration of power, corruption and
>resistance.
>
>“Pan’s Labyrinth” is his finest achievement so far and
>a film that already, seven months after it was first
>shown at the Cannes Film Festival, has the feel of
>something permanent. Like his friend and colleague
>Alfonso Cuarón, whose astonishing “Children of Men”
>opened earlier this week, Mr. Del Toro is helping to
>make the boundary separating pop from art, always
>suspect, seem utterly obsolete.
>
>“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a swift and accessible
>entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its
>effects. A child could grasp its moral insights
>(though it is not a film I’d recommend for most
>children), while all but the most cynical of adults
>are likely to find themselves troubled to the point of
>heartbreak by its dark, rich and emphatic emotions.
>
>The heroine is a girl named Ofelia, played by the
>uncannily talented Ivana Baquero, who was 11 when the
>film was made. Ofelia is the kind of child who eagerly
>reads stories about fairies, princesses and magic
>lands, longing to believe that what she reads is real.
>Mr. Del Toro obliges her wish by conjuring, just
>beyond the field of vision of the adults in Ofelia’s
>life, a grotesque, enchanted netherworld governed by
>the sometimes harsh rules of folk magic.
>
>That realm, in which Ofelia is thought to be a
>long-lost princess, may exist only in her imagination.
>Or maybe not: its ambiguous status is crucial to the
>film’s coherence. Like the Japanese animator Hayao
>Miyazaki, Mr. Del Toro is less interested in debunking
>or explaining away the existence of magic than in
>surveying the natural history of enchantment.
>
>The forest around the old mill where Ofelia and her
>mother come to live is full of signs and portents: old
>carved stones and half-buried, crumbling structures
>that attest to a pre-modern, pre-Christian body of
>lore and belief. In much of the West that ancient
>magic survives in the form of bedtime stories and
>superstitions, and these in turn, as Mr. Del Toro
>evokes them, lead back through the maze of human
>psychology into the profound mysteries of nature.
>
>Ofelia’s second reality — inhabited by a wide-browed
>faun, a man whose eyes are in the palms of his hands
>(both played by Doug Jones), a giant toad, some
>mantislike insects and many other curious creatures —
>can be a pretty scary place, and on her visits to it
>the girl is, like many a fairy-tale heroine, subjected
>to various challenges and ordeals. Still, this vivid
>world of fairies offers her an escape from the
>oppression of a day-to-day existence dominated by her
>stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), an officer in
>Franco’s army who seems to live by the maxim that
>fascism begins at home.
>
>A patriarch both by temperament and ideology, the
>captain treats Ofelia’s mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil),
>with chilly, humiliating decorum, making it clear that
>she is of value to him only because she is pregnant
>with his son. He takes pleasure in the exercise of
>authority and in the trappings of military discipline,
>addressing himself to the torture of captured
>resistance fighters with sadistic relish. He seems
>happiest when he is inflicting pain.
>
>The partisans up in the hills — and their sympathizers
>in the captain’s own household, including the
>housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) and the doctor
>(Alex Angulo) who attends to Carmen — represent one of
>the film’s alternatives to the militarized,
>hierarchical society taking shape in post-civil war
>Spain. Their easy solidarity and ragged mufti stand in
>emphatic contrast to the crisp uniforms and
>exaggerated obeisances of Vidal and his men. At his
>dinner table the captain gloats that Franco and his
>followers have defeated the “mistaken” egalitarianism
>of their republican opponents.
>
>Like “The Devil’s Backbone,” which also took place in
>the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, “Pan’s Labyrinth”
>is not overly concerned with moral subtlety. In Mr.
>López’s perversely charismatic performance, Vidal is a
>villain of the purest, ugliest kind. For Mr. Del Toro
>the opposite of evil is not holiness, but decency.
>
>Ofelia serves as her stepfather’s foil not because of
>her absolute goodness or innocence but rather because
>she is skeptical, stubborn and independent-minded. Her
>rebellion is as much against Carmen’s passivity as it
>is against Vidal’s brutality, and she gravitates
>toward the brave Mercedes as a kind of surrogate
>mother.
>
>Mercedes’s surreptitious visits to the rebels often
>coincide with Ofelia’s journeys into fairyland, and it
>may be that the film’s romantic view of the noble,
>vanquished Spanish Republic is itself something of a
>fairy tale. To note this is merely to identify a
>humanist, utopian strain in Mr. Del Toro’s vision, a
>generous, sorrowful view of the world that is not
>entirely alien to the history of horror movies. (Think
>of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” for example, a film
>linked to “Pan’s Labyrinth” by Victor Erice’s “Spirit
>of the Beehive,” one of the few masterpieces of
>Spanish cinema made before Franco’s death.)
>
>Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console
>as well as terrify. What distinguishes “Pan’s
>Labyrinth,” what makes it art, is that it balances its
>own magical thinking with the knowledge that not
>everyone lives happily ever after.
>
>The story has two endings, two final images that
>linger in haunting, unresolved tension. Here is a
>princess, smilingly restored to her throne, bathed in
>golden subterranean light. And here is a grown woman
>weeping inconsolably in the hard blue twilight of a
>world beyond the reach of fantasy.
>
>“Pan’s Labyrinth” is rated R (Under 17 requires
>accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has graphic
>violence and occasional obscene language.
>
>PAN’S LABYRINTH
>
>Opens today in New York.
>
>Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and
>directed by Guillermo Del Toro; director of
>photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Bernat
>Vilaplana; music by Javier Navarrete; production
>designer, Eugenio Caballero; produced by Bertha
>Navarro, Alfonso Cuarón, Frida Torresblanco and Álvaro
>Augustin; released by Picturehouse. Running time: 119
>minutes.
>
>WITH: Sergi López (Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes),
>Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Alex
>Angulo (Doctor) and Doug Jones (Pale Man).
>
>http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/movies/29laby.html
>
>Welcome to the official Pan’s Labyrinth movie site.
>
>http://www.panslabyrinth.com/
>
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