Labyrinths

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2009)

The English title of this movie is mistranslated. It is The Labyrinth of the Faun, a faun from the Kingdom of the Fairies being one of the central characters. The Greek God Pan has no part in the tale.
The most important feature of the story is not the fairy-tale labyrinth that the girl finds enters in the grounds of her new stepfather's house. It is the labyrinth of reality, truth, and ethics that we all find ourselves in, a problem that can be made particularly clear for everybody involved on all sides of the Spanish Civil War.
This labyrinth is the life-long theme of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, and an essential theme of Mercea Eliade.
For some, the labyrinth is impossible to navigate. For others, it turns out that the path through is simply straight ahead. It can turn out in other ways, too. When you come to an exit from the labyrinth, it can turn out that you have failed more utterly than if you simply remained lost inside, depending on how you have chosen your turnings. The exit from the labyrinth of life coincides with your death, but there are many ways in which one can choose to die, some where you achieve freedom, and some where you are far more thoroughly imprisoned than mere walls can achieve. Which version you find yourself in says more about you and your fears than about the structure of the labyrinth itself, which changes according to the way you think. Again, this can be made particularly clear in the context of a nasty, brutal war.
Other tales in which the labyrinth has this kind of meaning, and which refer to the ideas of Borges and Eliade, are The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco; and House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. The same labyrinth without the physical metaphor appears in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ("Well, then, I _will_ go to Hell.") and the movie Dingaka, which Jamie Uys directed well before his big hits, The Gods Must Be Crazy I & II.