Pan's Labyrinth
(New Line Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2006)
review by Died with Boots On

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ has to be the best foreign film I’ve ever seen in theaters.  It’s a very experimental picture that has an explosive combination of fantastic magic realism, tear-jerking realities, and gut-wrenching imagery not for the squeamish.  Guillermo del Toro is an incredibly intelligent and imaginative man with the mastery of language and character to write and tell a truly inspired story.  While the piece is fictional, it has enough nonfiction in it to rank among the great Latin American historical works of the past century, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘100 Years of Solitude’ and ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,’ Mário de Andrade’s ‘Macunaíma,’ and Laura Esquivel’s ‘Like Water for Chocolate.’

Del Toro sees ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ as the informal sequel to his earlier ghostly masterpiece, ‘Devil’s Backbone.’  “I’d call ‘Pan’s’ a mirror, or a companion piece, or, more accurately, even a sister movie, because ‘Devil’s Backbone’ is the brother movie, and this is the sister movie.”  After he purged the ‘action / comic book’ films from his system, he felt comfortable returning to the genre that established him as an artistic visionary.

The film switches back and forth between fairytale and bloodletting butchery.  Once upon a time, there was a girl who was the princess of an underground kingdom.  She longed to escape to the world above ground where she could live in the sunlight, but she was held captive there.  One day, she snuck past the guards and ran away to this world, but the sunlight blinded her eyes and erased her memory.  She became frail and weak and eventually she withered and died.  Her father, the king, was devastated by her death, but he remained steadfast in his belief that her soul would one day return in the form of a little girl.

Coming back from beautifully inked visuals of the fairytale sequence, the film introduces a grizzly environment set during the Spanish Civil War.  A cavalcade of chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes motor through the woods.  A little girl named Ofelia (Baquero) and her mother Carmen (Gil) sit on the backbench of a car leading the pack.  The mother, in the latter stages of an especially difficult pregnancy, gets carsick and asks the driver to pull over.  Ofelia strays from the car and finds the remnants of some long-forgotten, choked statue with the eye missing.  Ofelia picks up the rock with the eye chiseled into it and slides it back in the column of stone.  A praying mantis climbs out of the mouth and flies away.  Ofelia chases it, telling her mother that she saw a fairy.

When Ofelia and her mother arrive at their rustic country house that was commandeered by their new husband and father, one of Franco’s officers, Capitán Vidal (López), he is twisting his fingers in his leather gloves and staring at his pocket watch, mumbling that they are fifteen minutes late.  Vidal set up his base of operations in an old mill in the middle of some nowhere forest where vigilante guerillas are still resisting.  His plan is to stockpile all of the food and medicine rations in the stable and smoke the enemy out when their supplies run dry.  Ofelia clutches her fairytales to her chest and extends her left hand to her new step-father, El Capitán, but he just grips her wrist and wryly informs her that it is her other hand.  Ofelia reminds herself that he is not her father, that he is just The Captain.  She scurries off toward the entrance of an old stone labyrinth, not knowing what it is.  One of the indentured housemaids, Mercedes (Verdú), runs after Ofelia and tells her that it was there for as long as she can remember, forever.

Sleeping next to her mother, Ofelia is awakened in the night by the sound of a buzzing insect.  She sits up, frightened, and comes face to face with the praying mantis.  They stare at each other and Ofelia asks it if it’s a fairy, opening one of her fairytales and pointing to a picture.  The mantis transforms into the fairy pictured in the story.  It promptly begins waving for her to get out of bed, squeaking some piccolo-pitched gibberish.  Ofelia follows it to the entrance of the labyrinth, zigzagging through the narrow corridors to a circular enclosure.  She walks down a spiral staircase into the heart of the labyrinth, the fairy leading her to a rickety old faun.  The faun welcomes her back to her kingdom, explaining that she is the incarnation of the underground princess.  Making sure that she hasn’t become a mortal, he tells her that she must perform three tasks.  He cracks the spine of an ancient-looking text called the ‘Book of Crossroads.’  He tells her that the book with display her future when she is all by herself, that it will tell her what lies ahead of her.  She must complete all three before the next full moon, which is in three days, otherwise she will never return to her kingdom and be damned to the life of a mortal.  With her stepfather a ruthless monster that doesn’t have an ounce of love or compassion for anything, and the difficult challenges ahead of her, she finds herself clinging to her mother, who, because of the complications of her pregnancy, is on the verge of hemorrhaging and either miscarrying or dying.

Guillermo del Toro has become one of my favorite directors.  He is one of the few who can create beauty in viscera.  He comes from the humblest of beginnings and is inherently very in touch with himself.  He is very clear-minded and levelheaded and has a knack for mythmaking.  Not only is he a very talented writer / director, but a talented artist on a whole.  He keeps a diary of his thoughts, dreams, nightmares.  He carries it with him everywhere, perhaps even to places he shouldn’t.  He lost it in a taxicab one time, but was fortunate enough to have it returned to him.  He fills it with narratives, sketches, colorings.  There are a few pages copied onto the official website, and, while it’s written in Spanish, the sketches are absolutely spellbinding.

Del Toro writes from his personal experiences.  Coming from an impoverished town in Mexico, he draws on the rampant violence and bloodshed that he sees from day to day.  “And one of the first things I saw, is that we were in a street fight once, and I saw a guy hitting another guy with a bottle, and one of the things that impressed me the most is the bottle never broke.  Unlike in the movies, this bottle just kept going and going and going, and then I put that in the movie.”

Everything about this movie was perfect.  The two plotlines were flawlessly executed, running parallel to each other.  Obedience played heavily into both, the dreamscape a reflection of the horrors of the dreamer’s reality.  The twelve-year-old protagonist, Ivana Baquero, gave such a strong performance that I actually cried.  Her ability to make people cry is what got her the role.  Del Toro’s wife came to one of the auditions and cried during her cold reading.  Even though she was too old for the part, Del Toro knew it had to be her and rewrote the script to accommodate her.  The composer, Javier Navarrete, wrote a truly touching score.  My favorite piece of music from the film was ‘Mercedes’ Lullaby,’ an unforgettably whimsical tune that set the mood for the film.  The cinematography was breathtaking and the computer imagery was realistic enough.  The CGI wasn’t supposed to look lifelike, it was supposed to look like a fairytale, it was supposed to lend to the larger-than-life atmosphere.  The characters are perfect for the story.  The fascist Capitán Vidal was a great love-to-hate antagonist.  Every time he was in a shot, all I could hear was the annoying, ear-ringing crunching of leather.  This movie is a life-changing event.  It reminds me of why I got into film in the first place.  See it!