El Laberinto del Fauno
Yesterday, I saw the movie that I wanted to see last week, but didn't because of the 12:30 starting time. (I wanted to go to the Museum afterward for lunch and a look.) In other words, Guillermo del Toro's El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). It was an instance, not common for me, of seeing a film against my "better judgment" and being very grateful that I've done so. As a rule, I've found Spanish films something of a stretch, and Laberinto's fantasy elements looked to be somewhat off-putting. I didn't read the reviews when they appeared, but slowly caught the very favorable buzz: this is a movie that everybody wants to see. It will keep us all chattering for years to come.
El Laberinto del Fauno tucks a strange and dark fairy tale into a brutally realistic episode from the Spanish Civil War. (It is presumably fictional but not far from the awful truth.) A girl who is absorbed by fairy tales accompanies her pregnant mother up into the Pyrenees so that the expected child can be born at the camp of its father, Capitán Vidal. The captain, whose vicious ruthlessness feeds on fascist narcissism, is in charge of a major assault on a band of recalcitrant holdouts. The movie forces you to confront the brutality of the Civil War by killing off most of the characters in which you've invested some care: don't expect anyone in particular to survive. Suffice it to say that the captain's campaign is something of a losing battle.
Ofelía, the girl, soon finds herself attended by pixies (they morph from long, scary-looking beetles) and led into an ancient labyrinth near the captain's HQ. Here she meets the Faun (I don't think I'd have called him "Pan"), a friendly figure who tells her that she must undergo three ordeals in order to find out whether she embodies the spirit of the underworld princess from her favorite story. Many viewers, I'm sure, will conclude that Ofelía is deeply deluded, her mind broken by severe environmental stress (for starters, she certainly doesn't care for the captain). That's one way of resolving the tension between fantasy and realism. I'm happy to let that tension vibrate: perhaps the fantasy is as real as anything. What makes Laberinto so powerful is the degree to which the captain's dreadfulness is matched by the terror of Ofelía's ordeals. The tone of the film is, for the most parts, uniformly grueling, but many moments of intermittent charm keep it fresh and engaging.
The four principal actors are superb. Ivana Baquero is a wonderful Ofelía, with an open, tenderly pretty face that recalls Kate Beckinsale's in Cold Comfort Farm. Sergi López, whom I could swear I've seen in something, is magnificent as Capitán Vidal, a man of demented pride who can set his face at an almost wrinkle-free repose. Maribel Verdú plays Mercedes, the captain's principal servant, as a woman onto whose face the dolorousness of the Civil War has been etched. Doug James, who hails from Indianapolis and who apparently is no stranger to prosthetic costumes, acts the part of the Faun, which I assume to have been dubbed in Spanish. Adriana Gil and Alex Angulo are also very good as Ofelía's mother and the local doctor, respectively.
Coming out of the theatre, I could only think of what would happen had this film been set during World War I, in Turkey - the time of the Armenian genocide that official Turkey finds it impossible to acknowledge. El Laberinto del Fauno is unflinching about the atrocities that brought Francisco Franco to power and kept him there until his death. In the space of a generation, Spain has joined the rest of modern Europe, but Laberinto reminds us that nothing turns the coal of fear into the diamond of beautiful insight more predictably than ardent oppression.
