Pan's Labyrinth

[Dave Monroe]

Magic Touch
Fantastical meets political in this stunning
for-adults-only fairy tale
by J. Hoberman
December 26th, 2006 11:56 AM


Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro,  Pan's
Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing
degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known
for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy
franchises has transformed the horror of
mid-20th-century European history into a boldly
fanciful example of what surrealists would call  le
merveilleux.

Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring
mix of fantasy and politics, Pan's Labyrinth begins
with a "once upon a time," then becomes utterly
specific. Spain 1944: The civil war is over, and
Franco's Falangists have long since subjugated the
country. The Maquis, last remnants of Republican
resistance, are fighting a rearguard action in the
forested northern hills. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and
her ailing, pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil) have been
relocated there, to a remote military base commanded
by her new stepfather, Capitán Vidal (Sergi López), a
cold and brutal autocrat.

Pan's Labyrinth itself may be too cruel and bloody for
children, although kids would surely appreciate its
exquisite yuckiness. (Del Toro can be as textural as
David Cronenberg.) But this R-rated poetic fable is
nonetheless set in a child's archaic reality, a magic
world of ancient ruins and "fairy" insects. A
persistent dragonfly (perhaps the manifestation of her
own incipient madness) guides Ofelia from her bedroom
to the center of an overgrown garden maze. There in
the darkness she encounters the horned and walleyed
faun. This mossy, capricious creature is an altogether
different type than the gentle little Narnian creature
who befriends the young heroine in The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe—a movie that del Toro turned down,
apparently for religious reasons. (He told Sight and
Sound that he "wasn't interested in the lion
resurrecting.")

The faun persuades Ofelia that she is an orphaned
princess and assigns the gravely self-contained child
a series of magical tasks; her adventures in the
underworld are then intercut with the guerrilla war in
the woods. Del Toro has an unusual capacity to keep
the narrative moving on two levels. Secrets abound.
Everyone has a mission. The commander's housekeeper,
formidable, fearless Mercedes (the movie's secret
star, Maribel Verdú, best known as the older woman in
Y Tu Mamá También) is aiding the insurgents—as is the
local doctor. From Ofelia's perspective, there are all
sorts of monsters, human and otherwise. The latter
range from the living mandrake root the child uses to
forestall her mother's miscarriage to the blind,
devouring Pale Man (played, like the faun, by the
protean Doug Jones). The human monster is, of course,
the murderous Vidal.

Del Toro has mixed the historical and supernatural
before. Another tale of an abandoned child in the
Spanish Civil War, The Devil's Backbone (2001) was a
discomfiting, albeit ambitious, mix of gothic
thriller, boy's adventure story, and political
allegory—visually coherent if thematically
cacophonous. Pan's Labyrinth, by contrast, is not just
strongly imagined but superbly integrated and
marvelously fluid. It's also highly resonant. Just as
the images in Ofelia's magical book (illustrated by
the filmmaker himself) spread like Rorschach blots
across the pages, all manner of conflicts and
parallels churn below the film's narrative.

That surface is voluptuously detailed. The lighting is
molded; the chiaroscuro is almost cloying. Javier
Navarrete's score is rhapsodic. The totality of del
Toro's design seems comparable to Tim Burton's (and
del Toro seems equally taken with the dark, gnarly
work of the early-20th-century English illustrator
Arthur Rackham). But unlike Burton—or His Imperial
Cuteness Steven Spielberg—del Toro is immune to
whimsy. There's certainly a measure of pathos to the
movie's ending but there's nothing saccharine about
Ofelia's struggle with evil.

Magic realism leavened with moral seriousness, Pan's
Labyrinth belongs with a handful of classic movie
fantasies: Cocteau's Orphée, Charles Laughton's The
Night of the Hunter, Neil Jordan's The Company of
Wolves. Its key precursor, however, may be the
greatest of Franco-era Spanish movies, Víctor Erice's
The Spirit of the Beehive. Although utterly different
types of filmmaking, each of these is the story of a
brave little girl lost in a world of make-believe—at
once an intuitive anti-fascist and the innocent victim
of a monstrous system.

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0652,hoberman,75394,20.html

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