How have I got to this point in my life without ever having seen Pan's Labyrinth? I saw Guillermo Del Toro's last two movies -- the fascist Pinocchio one, which I quite liked, and the fairground geek gothic one, which I liked very much. I think I have also seen the horror themed superhero thing which I was relatively indifferent to. How, indeed, did I manage to be inside the cinema (another Everyman Throwback show) without the slightest idea what Pan's Labyrinth was even about?
Gosh, indeed, what a movie.
I was surprised, on checking, to realise that Pan's Labyrinth is as relatively recent as 2006. Sometime around 1984 every third film seemed to be a dream expressionist take on Alice in Wonderland -- think Company of Wolves, Legend, Labyrinth and obviously Dreamchild. Pan's Labyrinth felt like an art house consummation of the genre, but it came along twenty years late -- in rough proximity to Neil Gaiman's amiable but dotty Mirrormask.
It's hard to say what the film is about: but it just works. It comprises two different plots, a realistic one and a fantastic one, and entirely refuses to explain their relationship in any of the expected ways. If you were watching a film about a little girl who escapes from an horrific situation through a magic doorway into a world of friendly fairies, ambiguous fawns and terrifying eyeless demons, you'd expect it to turn out that the fantasy world is a dream, which allegorises her own predicament. Or just possibly you'd expect a full-on happy ending where Aslan comes into the real world and jolly well gives the baddies a good what-for. De Toro resolutely does neither. The two stories just end, one happily, one tragically. I don't think anyone apart from the little girl, Ofella, actually sees any of the supernatural creatures; but the fairy magic seems to have real world efficacy. Putting mandrake under the bed cures her mother's fever, in defiance of all medical expectation. I think I thought that the fairy underworld was really real but that no-one apart from Ofella will ever know. But if I watched it again I might feel that it was a dream or compensatory fantasy.
Fairy tales are by by definition stories about children transitioning from the mundane world to the supernatural and both worlds can be very dark -- you run from the arms of cruel stepmothers into the arms of cannibal witches. The outer story in Pan's Labyrinth is very dark indeed: Ofella's mother is marrying a monumentally sadistic fascist leader in post-civil war Spain; the one person in the household who is kind to her is the sister of one of the communist rebels. It's a gripping thriller, and scenes in which Vidal tortures his prisoners are genuinely disturbing. But I think the situation may be held slightly at arms length: Ofella's stepfather is just a little bit too evil to be quite believed, and the republican rebels are just a little bit too noble and heroic. Several of the plot devices -- the key, the dress, the stammering hostage -- themselves feel like elements in a fairy story.
Ofella's fantasy-realm is an escape, certainly, but it's an escape into a world which is even more frightening than the mundane one. And there is no suggestion (as there is in, say, the Magician's Nephew) that the underworld contains a secret or a boon which could save her mother or defeat the fascists. She is a little girl in a terrible political situation who also happens to be the reincarnation of the queen of the fairies.
Traditional fairy tales may sometimes contain morals (keep promises; be kind to animals and the old) but they are actually pretty amoral and arbitrary: as if faerie works according to quite different rules to the rest of us. Pan's Labyrinth catches that arbitrary quality perfectly: yet it is at the same time a perfectly formed film; the kind where we realise what the ending has to be only a few seconds before the characters do.
Ofella likes fairy stories and her mother thinks they are a waste of time; but despite coming after the Gaiman Ascendency there is mercifully little here about the mystical redeeming power of Story. If anything, the message is that the real world is more like a fairy tale and the fairyland more like reality than you thought.
The english title of the movie is probably really The Labyrinth of the Faun. (Did I mention it was subtitled?) The fact that the first fairy-creature Ofella meets is a faun inevitably makes some of us think of C.S Lewis. But each interaction with a non-human creation left me thinking -- hell, why couldn't this director have been let loose on the Hobbit?
The english title of the movie is probably really The Labyrinth of the Faun. (Did I mention it was subtitled?) The fact that the first fairy-creature Ofella meets is a faun inevitably makes some of us think of C.S Lewis. But each interaction with a non-human creation left me thinking -- hell, why couldn't this director have been let loose on the Hobbit?
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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