The Beauty of Horror: in the extraordinary Fauno's Labyrinth, a little girl enters the underground of imagination - and finds the key to defeat fascism

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2006)

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, 42 years-old, says he has gone through most of the years of his life trying to recover from his first ten - spent in the company of his fanatic religious grandmother (that advocated also the physical punishment of the body) and of other monstrous creatures (these taken from his imagination). May Del Toro forgive egoism: it is done here votes so that he will never be able frighten his ghosts, which served as raw material for several interesting movies, such as Chronos, The Devil's Backbone and Hellboy, and now a work truly extraordinary. In El Labirinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), little girl Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), age eleven, is taken to the inside of the wolf's den: an advanced post of the army of Francisco Franco, to the north of Spain, where an assassin captain (Sergi López, exhaling threat) tries to crush focuses of republican resistance. The captain just married Ofelia's mother and already produced on her an heir. What is inside her mother is, to Ofelia, a mystery. It can be someone like her - an innocent - or then somebody like her stepfather.
Surrounded by fear and brutality, the girl finds an exit. Enters a labyrinth, at the back of the property, and then sees herself into an underground world, staged in colors and details so vivid that, since the beginning, it's what appears to be more real. There, an ancient fauno informs Ofelia that she is the princess of this kingdom. If she fulfills three tasks, she can return to it. The tasks follows the classic rules of fairy tales, with frogs, mystical doors, keys and prohibitions - such as to never, never, taste any food when you're inside a magical dimension. (Rule that Ofelia, by the way, breaks, awakening a pale man, with his eyes on the palm of his hands, at the same place of the stigmas of Christ.) Del Toro knows the conventions of fairy tales inside out and back and forth, and return to then their traditional sense: the codes that serves at the same time to simplify and codify the great fears of existence. With the ownership of them, Ofelia manages to handle with the crushing reality that surrounds her. More: she manages to dominate it. Del Toro knows that fascism doesn't have any worse enemy than pureness and imagination - "the most disobedient of the qualities", as defined by the director in interview to the press. Ofelia possesses both, and because of them will become a formidable adversary to her stepfather.
The Labyrinth is one of the rare cases in which the narrative and the metaphor not only live well together but multiply each other's effects. The imaginative world of Ofelia is powerful on itself, because Del Toro believes in the symbols he is using and the force they hold. And it is equally efficient as representation of the unique century Spain has gone through. Ofelia steals the just-been born brother and allows, thus, that he grows up without knowing the ominous name of his father. It is the Spain of resistance giving birth to the uneasy and creative Spain that resurged from the subterranean with the end of the franquist dictatorship. More than anything else, however, the Labyrinth is a promise - of an original director, that gives indications of holding so many other magnificent movies inside himself.