El Laberinto del Fauno (aka. Pan’s Labyrinth) (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
I just saw Guillermo del Toro’s latest, El Laberinto del Fauno (aka. Pan’s Labyrinth), and I’m pretty impressed. This is one of the best original works of speculative fiction in film in recent years, I think. Like most of del Toro’s movies, it teeters on the edge of being amazingly good, but then fails because of some hard to believe plot twist or dialogue. Guillermo del Toro is obviously an idea guy, and he has great ideas (all of his movies have the kind of stories that probably look amazing as treatments), but he’s not a great screenwriter. Still, this is probably his best movie to date, even better than Hellboy, which in itself was quite good.
This isn’t that easily identifiable as either horror or fantasy, but it has aspects of both, set against the in itself quite horrible reality of early Fascist Spain. A young girl, Ofelia, travels with her pregnant mother to rural northern Spain to meet her mother’s new husband, an army captain whose two principal interests are brutally defeating the remaining leftist guerrillas hiding in the mountains, and the impending birth of his son by Ofelia’s mother. He’s not particularly interested in Ofelia or her mother, which leaves Ofelia to wander about and soon find an ancient labyrinth whose central chamber is occupied by the titular faun, who tells her she might just be the lost princess of an underground kingdom.
That fantasy story, however, mostly takes the back seat to the fight between the captain and the guerrillas, punctuated by a couple of sequences of extremely brutal violence that made me flinch. The first one is very unexpected, and reminded me perhaps most of the murder in the first sequence in Irréversible, not at all as long-lasting, but much more jarring because of the surprise onset. During the movie, the captain is painted as so much of an asshole (but quite a believable one) that when he finally gets his dues, you wish he could suffer more.
In the meantime, Ofelia has to pass three tests given to her by the faun, to prove that’s she’s really the lost princess. In the first, she must confront a giant toad living under a dead tree, a challenge that, apart from the visceral special effects, is quite in keeping with the fairy-tale roots of the movie. The second, however, is when things veer deeply into horror territory. Simply drawing a doorway on her bedroom wall with a piece of chalk, Ofelia enters the gallery of The Pale Man, a monstrous humanoid thing with no eyes in its head, but with apparently removable eyes in the palms of its hands. The creepy alien weirdness of it reminds me of Lovecraft, which is obviously a general inspiration for del Toro (see Hellboy, and also del Toro is apparently doing an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness). Now that I think about it, there’s also a visual parallel with Y’golonac, an extended Lovecraft mythos monster with mouths, not eyes, in the palms of its hands.
Sadly, it’s in this very creepy scene that the movie also offers its biggest letdown in terms of character motivation. Despite having been warned explicitly and urgently by the faun not to partake of the Pale Man’s buffet of delicious food (he sits motionless at the head of a large table filled to the brim with it), and despite the faeries who guide her trying to stop her, Ofelia decides to stop at the table and taste a couple of grapes. This piece of plain, unadulterated, and unmotivated idiocy wakes the Pale Man, from whom Ofelia barely escapes, and also causes the faun to declare her unable to pass the tests. It’s a plot contrivance to be able to wake the Pale Man, but it could easily have been handled in a myriad other ways that would not have caused the audience to view the main character as either terminally stupid or suffering from acute short-term memory loss.
Later on, the movie improves again, and the end is heart-wrenching and appropriately fairy-tale style tragic, although the “was she imagining it all, or was it real” touches of the ending, despite seeming to finally come down on the side of her experiences being real, weaken things a bit, and if one were to come to the conclusion that it was all fantasy, the moral would be that childhood fantasy is a dangerous thing which leads children to putting themselves and others in mortal peril for no good reason. I don’t think that’s the moral del Toro wants to promote, and that’s without even getting into the theme of someone being a lost princess whose very soul has qualities that makes her fit to rule, in a movie that’s otherwise doing a fine job of being anti-fascist.
But, quibbles aside, this is a very good movie in many ways. It’s a shame that del Toro, a Mexican, seems to be unable to make his movies in Mexico (only his first, Cronos, that of the interesting idea but fatally flawed and clichéd execution, was made in Mexico, subsequent ones have been made in Spain or the US), but even though his production is uneven, he always seems to dedicate himself 100% to the story of his movies, with little concern for anything else. That’s got to be worth something, and he seems to be getting better all the time.