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| Subject: Pan's Labyrinth | |
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Author: Kylopod |
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Date Posted: 05:02:08 09/21/07 Fri Author Host/IP: pool-71-246-77-113.bltmmd.east.verizon.net/71.246.77.113 "Pan's Labyrinth" is not what I expected. The only thing I knew when I decided to watch the film was that I would probably love it. I have a special affection for movies that blur the line between fantasy and reality. I walked out of the movie stunned, and I had to watch it a second time before collecting my thoughts, a rare reaction from me. I thought it was going to be a children's film. Apparently many other people made that assumption; it was falsely advertised in some places, and parents ended up bringing their kids to see it, a bad mistake. It almost makes "Temple of Doom" look like "Mary Poppins." I knew something was awry as soon as the content warning appeared with the label "graphic violence." The thing is, it has many of the elements of a children's movie, the kind where a child escapes from a wicked caretaker into a magical realm. But the film uses this premise to create a surprisingly dark, intense tale that is as much about the horrors of war as it is about fairies. I don't believe I've ever seen anything quite like it. If there were more movies of this kind, it might be less notable. But as of now it's in its own category. By the middle of the film, I had very little idea where the story was going--which is pretty amazing, since the basic plot elements are highly derivative, and there's a heavy use of foreshadowing. The movie is just so raw and brutal that just about anything can happen. It somehow departs from a standard formula where we can easily predict each character's fate. We know that at least a couple of characters are going to die, but we have a hard time figuring out who among the others will survive. The movie's fantasy themes are a reversal of the norm. In most stories of this kind (e.g. "Peter Pan"), the child escapes into a fantasy world as a way of avoiding the shades of gray found in the adult world. Here, it's just the opposite. The girl's stepfather is an utter monster of a human being, an army captain who has no compunction about cruelly killing innocents in his quest to uproot Spanish guerillas. (Some knee-jerk right-wingers, ignorant of the film's historical context, have called the film Communist propaganda.) People like the father really existed during World War II. He isn't even charming, which makes us wonder what the mother ever saw in him. The girl's real father was his tailor, and after the father died he impregnated the mother. Presumably she was attracted to his sense of order and power, though I have a more sinister theory. He seems not to care one whit about her failing health. All that matters to him is that she delivers a healthy baby so that he can achieve his own immortality, which parallels what the girl is seeking. He is so uncompromisingly evil that, in some ways, he seems more like a fairy tale character than any of the creatures she encounters in the labyrinth. It is there that she meets ambiguous figures, most notably the faun who claims to be helping her but who may have more ominous intentions. Even a baby-slaughtering boogeyman she runs into (the source of a visual moment so striking it will tempt viewers to make hand motions as surely as people leave "The Princess Bride" muttering "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya....") isn't quite as menacing as the stepfather. One thing the movie doesn't do is create a full magical world. The labyrinth is never explored in any detail. The faun is the only creature we get to know in any measure. He has her perform a set of tasks of the sort you might find in a role-playing adventure game, but they seem to serve no purpose other than to test her character. There's a lot of symbolism in the story, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. When it comes to storytelling, symbolism cannot stand on its own; it always should be held up by a narrative that makes sense on a literal level. The fantasy sequences here never totally come together in a cohesive way. Still, the movie is a visual and literary wonder. The director and screenwriter, Guillermo del Toro, reportedly translated the film into English himself. This decision paid off, for the script reads like poetry--simple, yet elegant. The visuals are similarly minimalist, the first time I have seen CGI used in an impressive but non-showy manner. The faun's appearance seems to evoke nothing more lavish than a masked actor from Ancient Greek theater. I am less inclined than some other viewers to probe the question of whether the girl's fantasies are real or not. (A third possibility is that the girl has some kind of psychic premonition, since many of the real-world events seem to happen after being foreshadowed in the fantasy sequences.) As with "The Wizard of Oz," we take the fantasies to be real while they occur, but the possibility that they exist only in the girl's mind simply gives the story an added psychological dimension. It is on that level that the movie succeeds so brilliantly: we can believe that a girl in these dreaded circumstances would create such a fantasy, though it's a rather different sort of "escape" from what we're used to in this genre. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Re: Pan's Labyrinth | Mr. Bungle | 08:04:44 09/21/07 Fri |
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