Confrontingly fantastic

Rating: 8/10 (12 December 2006)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this.
Is it a happy ending, or a sad ending? Is one more real than the other, and if we accept that it is simply because it seems obvious, is it necessarily more important than the other? In a sense, it's the happy ending that Ofelia strives for that brings about the unhappy version of events, and in the end the two coincide.
I guess I'm still somewhat confused and trying to make sense of the senseless, and in some ways maybe that just means that I got the whole point of the movie. It's politically charged yet poetic, senselessly violent as it is fantastic and as inspiring at is depressing.
I'd expect that many people would walk out of a cinema with similarly mixed feelings - I didn't know whether to smile or to cry. Much of the audience I sat with dealt with some of the more gruesome moments with a form of collective comic relief - where humour inappropriately surfaces to confront harsh realities that we prefer to deny: "they're not really going to make us watch that, are they?"; followed by, "can i look now? is it over yet?".
This is definitely not for children, although I doubt it would exceed an M (15+) rating in this country. Only things like sex and drugs seem to qualify for that. If the language and violence were toned down then you might be able to pretend that there were something in it for both adults and children, but that's clearly not the intention here and I think best avoided.
Instead, the fantasy world of Ofelia becomes almost as relevant, almost as real as the world of the adult characters, and it's the parallel course of the two and their eventual interjoining that leads to the inevitable conclusion of this story.
So I guess I could sit here and think about this in terms of a portrayal of the evils of fascism - in context. I could think about this in terms of an artwork - a traditionally surreal and complex way of telling a story that's set in a particular place in history. But I think I'll choose to look at this as a way of experiencing a story from two different points of view: the harsh actuality of the adult world with all its nasty and cruel realities (just as Ofelia's mother points out to her), contrasted with the coping mechanisms and "innocence" - verging on denial - of Ofelia's own journey through the events that take place...
Having said that, it's hard to give one more weight than the other. Who's really in denial? So I leave the theatre not quite knowing what to think, how to feel or what to do next.
Cool.
P.S. There are plenty of bombs and action scenes for the rest of you.