project film school

Pan's Labyrinth 1/1/07
dir. Guillermo del Toro

on monday, jay, zara, daria and I started the new year off with a trip to see "pan's labyrinth". the film was an amazing mix of political allegory and fantasy, splashed with the violent reality of a nation destroyed by civil war. the film follows a young heroin, ofelia as she and her pregnant mother move to the country to live with ofelia's new step-father captain vidal. vidal is a loyal franco devotee and is in the country to eradicate a group of anti-fascist resisters. upon arrival, ofelia meets faun, who informs her that she is the long lost princess moanna - he gives her 3 tasks to complete in order to reclaim her throne. ofelia splits her time protecting her mother and attempting to determine her own destiny, while struggling to overcome the gruesome violence that seems to define both worlds.

even with a few days to let the film swish around in my head, i don't know if i can discuss it clearly. so instead, i am going to cite two passages in "girl interuppted" by mark kermode from the december issue of bfi's sight and sound:

"Like its predecessor, Pan's Labyrinth balances political tensions with a feud between fantasy and reality, between the way the world seems and the way it is. "The Devil's Backbone was set in a time that belongs only to Spain - because six months after Franco won, Hitler invaded Poland," del Toro explains. "But in Pan's Labyrinth we're dealing with the end of the Second World War, a moment when the Spanish resistance fully believed, for very good reason, that the Allies would turn around and help them take care of Franco - which, of course, they proved not to do. In conjunction with this historical reality, I was trying to uncover a common thread between the 'real world' and the 'imaginary world', which I found in one of the seminal bloodlines within fairytales: the bloodline of choice. It's something that has intrigued me since Cronos, through Hellboy, and now to Pan's Labyrinth: the way your choices define you. And I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose which the girl takes in this movie."

Crucially, this quest involves a journey through a labyrinth, a word which has become synonymous with the Civil War (think of key historical accounts such as Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth), and which served as the "perfect metaphor" for del Toro's endeavours. "A maze is a place where you get lost," he explains, "but a labyrinth is essentially a place of transit: an ethical, moral transit to one inevitable centre. You think of the transit of Spanish society from the 1940s to the incredible explosion of the post-Franco period. The 1980s in Spain were like the 1960s in the rest of the world! In the movie, Ofelia is a 'princess who forgot who she was and where she came from', who progresses through the labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to know the name of their father - the fascist. It's a parable - just as The Devil's Backbone was a parable - of the Spanish Civil War. Putting aside the implications of the English-language title, which simply sounded better than 'The Faun's Labyrinth', I really needed this creature to be ambiguous. It's important that Ofelia chooses to enter this new world, despite the fact that her guide is unreliable and unattractive. So we made the faun a creaky, ancient creature who becomes more physically beautiful as he becomes more perverse. It's subliminal almost, but essentially the girl distrusts him the most the better he looks."

here is a link to the entire article