The screening on Sunday 10 May will include a Q&A with Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth proves beyond doubt what fans of his previous films, such as Hellboy (2004) and Blade II (2002), have claimed all along. The Mexican is not only a skilled director mining a rich vein in fantasy/horror; he is an artist full stop. Pan’s Labyrinth begins by making a clear demarcation between the world of recognisable reality inhabited by the young heroine, Ofelia, her mother and her vicious stepfather, Captain Vidal, and the parallel enchanted world of fauns, monsters and princesses that Ofelia escapes into. The ‘real’ world is violent, vindictive and brutal; there is no law but that of the powerful, represented by Vidal, an officer in Franco’s Civil Guard.
The fact that del Toro has chosen to set his film in the year 1944, five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, is significant. The 1940s are often referred to as the ‘years of hunger’ in Spain; food, like freedom of action and thought, is hidden, locked away, enjoyed only by the elite. No less important to the film’s effects is the physical setting, the north of Spain – close to the French frontier, which plot-wise provides a potential escape for the maquis, the Republican resistance movement waging guerrilla warfare against Franco’s regime. Generically, the setting allows for the dense woodlands, darkness, rain and damp traditionally associated with horror. Ofelia lives in a place that is a haven for rot of all kinds.
Initially, the world Ofelia escapes into seems to be a world of her own imaginings. But as she keeps going through the portal into the magical realm, it begins to seem that that realm really exists independently of Ofelia’s imagination, that it represents a hope for a fulfilment of desires that are blocked only by the violence and cruelty of the ‘real’ world. By the end of the film, the two worlds are so enmeshed that it’s difficult to distinguish them. It’s as if the dreaminess of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast was transported with Alice into Wonderland, only to erupt back into the real world as Goya-esque nightmares. The magical pierces the real world and for a while terror and death pervade all.
In a film with such excellent CGI and production values it’s interesting that what lingers in the mind are the characters. Of these, the standouts are Sergi López’s Vidal and Ivana Baquero’s Ofelia. This is not only because of the superb way they are written, filmed or played. To my knowledge, Vidal is the first representation of an all-out-evil Civil Guard in Spanish cinema; he is as cartoonishly wicked as all those Nazis in US cinema. In a Spain currently obsessed with issues of historical memory arising from the Civil War, this is bound to cause comment.
The character also represents a regendering of the wicked stepmother figure in traditional fairytales. He is one of several patriarch figures in the film, who include Ofelia’s real father, a good but dead tailor; the faun that is her guide to the magical realm and who might be teaching her how to go to hell; and her imaginary father, the king of the underworld (a marvellously iconic use of the legendary Federico Luppi), who might very well be the devil.
Just as the figure of the father recurs structurally to distort, refract and evoke various versions of patriarchal terror, so Ofelia, the innocent child, also carries multiple meanings. Ofelia is the child of Franco so memorably evoked by Ana Torrent in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive and Carlos Saura’s Cria cuervos, the child who silently watches, witnessing all the brutality of civil war and domestic misery and who is in turn rendered monstrous. What happens to the child in all of these films, the perversion of innocence, the death of the soul is a resonant allegory for fascism. But whereas Erice and Saura conveyed this slowly and opaquely, so that the audience would have the time necessary to interpret the meaning designed to evade censors, del Toro’s film works by narrative propulsion and visceral kicks. In a way the film is a wonderful marriage of Hollywood genre and European art film; it’s like Hitchcock in the sense that it is popular cinema that provides more than its expected generic pleasures, while offering rich commentary on who we are and the world we live in.
If Pan’s Labyrinth is vindication for del Toro’s fans, it might also be seen as a warning to Hollywood. Most recently the Hollywood carrot to entice the best of foreign talent has been that, because of barriers of budgets and technology, certain genres of cinema (generally those requiring casts of thousands or complex special effects) could only be made in Hollywood. Pan’s Labyrinth is not only del Toro’s best film, but also his most demanding and accomplished in terms of production and CGI. It says something that a Mexican director at ease in Hollywood had to go to Spain to make it.
José Arroyo, Sight and Sound, December 2006
With thanks to
Cai Mason, Lisa Taback, Imogen Munsey and the Netflix team, Gary Ungar
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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