Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 2:09 pm 
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Dreams in red; memories in blue: fascism and a child's escapes

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) is an unusual blend of fairy tale and nightmarish modern history – a well-produced, well-acted amalgam with seamless and powerful use of sound, image and special effect that seems likely to impress some American art-house audiences and fans or the Mexican director’s earlier Spanish-language films, Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone. Like the latter, this is colored by the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s men have won, but the Republicans are still fighting and the nasty Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) heads a small company of fascist forces headquartered in a hillside mill who are trying to wipe out a band of partisans operating nearby. As the film begins a pair of period Rolls Royces carries Carmen (Ariadna Gil), the new wife of Vidal, pregnant and ill. With her is her bookish, reserved daughter Ofelia (Ivan Baquero). Perhaps to escape the ugly world of the Captain, who immediately reveals himself to be not just a stiff meanie, but a chauvinist and a sadistic brute, Ofelia, already followed by a large clicking fairy-insect on the ride, retreats into the fantasy world of her books, which soon becomes the film's alternative universe. Playing outdoors near a damp labyrinth, Ofelia encounters an aged Faun (Pan; del Toro regular Doug Jones, in mechanized and digitalized gear) who tells her she is a lost princess who must perform three dangerous tasks to be restored to power and return to her underground home.

The movie could be seen as a sinister spin on the Alice books or perhaps as Disney-meets-Bunuel (though Bunuel isn’t really a source). This is magic realism with a bloody streak and a free play of imagination. Del Toro blends his strongest personal models here – the influences of exiled Spanish Republicans who were mentors to him in his youth; fairly tales and legends; comic books; even video games play into the mixture. If the result feels somewhat indigestible, it’s not because the writer-director hasn’t given his historical and fantasy worlds equal weight, but because their coexistence is both hard to credit and too vivid. Events on both sides of the looking-glass are equally horrific, and the flow back and forth is smooth. And a strong feature of the film is that despite its use of state-of-the-art special effects, they are handled with a certain tact and restraint.

While Ofelia is performing her tasks, including an encounter with a giant toad and a terrifying Pale Man (Jones again) with eyes in his palms, Captain Vidal is losing ground against the partisans, who are helped by his housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu of Y Tu Mamá También) and his doctor (Alex Angulo); Vidal personally and zestfully carries out medieval-style tortures to extract information from captured fighters. Meanwhile the ailing, pregnant Carmen is a virtual prisoner, and it’s clear Vidal only wants a male son and doesn’t care if she dies in childbirth. To protect her future brother, Ofelia uses a large, squirmy root given her by the Faun that looks like a human fetus, and prays for the survival of her mother.

Those who are eager for the downfall of the evil Captain are not likely to be disappointed, but this is a bloody, disturbing story in which there are few survivors and is absolutely not a fairy tale for children. Even more creepy than the unpredictable psychopath of With a Friend Like Harry here, Sergi Lopez is one of the best screen villains now working: his Captain Vidal is a disturbing if unvarying blend of Freudian obsession and sheer cruelty. Is this what men – or fascists – are like? (Scenes of the fantasy world are in warm colors with rounded 'feminine' shapes predominant; the fascists’ realm is in blues and 'male' right angles.)

While the story moves along with jaw-dropping vividness and del Toro never loses touch with his own imagination, the family relationships have no more depth than a fairy tale. A less grandly visual film with less spectacular effects might have interrelated real and imaginary worlds in more thought-provoking ways. It’s not entirely clear what Ofelia’s attitudes toward the actual setting are. Nonetheless, despite its horrific details and its strange combination of the childlike and the political, this is, overall, a visual and auditory treat, indebted to many sources yet not quite like anything else. It had a a kind of festive grandeur that made it a suitable closing night presentation for the New York Film Festival, 2006.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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