El Laberinto del Fauno

Finally saw Pan's Labyrinth last night. I was very intrigued by what my friends were saying about the movie. Two friends said it was excessively (and unnecessarily?) violent, that the parallel stories of the Spanish Civil War & fairytale did not work, and that there was one decision the protagonist makes in the film that is unjustified and unbelievable. Two other friends said it was their favorite film of 2006.

I feel I ought to say outright before I go any further that I am a total sucker for stories that feature young female protagonists (like my favorite, Spirited Away) and the fact that the heroine's name was Ofelia worked not so unconsciously to rack up points in the film's favor. But even compared to Guillermo's previous films (Mimic -- [which I saw in Thailand in one of those moments of desperate need for a dose of American culture] a pretty visually stunning portrayal of a world trying to contain disease; The Devil's Backbone -- the ghost of a boy drowned in an underground pool under an orphanage seeks revenge, set, here too, during the Spanish Civil War; and Hellboy -- based on the beautiful comic book, a mutated demon born of scientific/occult experiments of the Nazis fights now for the good guys (i.e. American bureau) while seeking the roots of his own diabolic heritage) Labyrinth seemed to realize all of del Toro's obsessions clearly. The horrific violence of war epitomized by the pathologically twisted & fascistic capitan, juxtaposed with the wonderfully mysterious grotesqueness of the fairytale world worked to demonstrate the inextricable link - no, the absolute dependent relationships of light and dark, the real and the imagined. And the world of the imagined/dark lies only a chalk's length away from the world of the real/light.

I know fuck-all about Spanish history, but del Toro's themes resonate beyond specifics: there is no justice in life, but there is beauty. How are the horrors of humanity (war, violence, sickness, injustice) digested, represented, perpetuated (in order to make digestable) by the imagination and collective mythology of our cultures? Or rather, how can innocence survive (does it survive?) in such a sickened world? I didn't mind the violence, I have to say -- simply because my horror at the violence was as potent as my fascination for the mystical -- in fact I would argue that both are necessary to get the point across. Yeah, I pretty much bought it all the way, now makes my top 3 of 2006 for sure.

p.s. When I first began seeing posters for this movie, I thought it was for The Golden Compass (Pan referring to the protagonist's daemon-avatar-soulmate-doppelganger Pantalaimon), from the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman -- a mind-blowing read, and incidentally the film adaptation will be coming out in theaters later this year, starring the frigid Nicole Kidman.