OT: "Pan's Labyrinth"
porti...@yahoo.com
0-100 - G
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).
Yelps
<porti...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1167422498.6...@79g2000cws.googlegroups.com...
Finally, a fantasy movie starring a young girl. Sounds good for ages
0-100 - G
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).<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Been looking forward to seeing this. Read another good review of it this AM
in the LA Daily News.
dc