Lose yourself in the labyrinth

Rating: 10/10 (14 December 2006)

Having admirably juggled Hollywood and Spanish language pictures in the past, Guillermo Del Toro returns with a film that is both incredibly imaginative and unreal yet deeply moving on a most human level. It is to Del Toro's great credit that both the film's two worlds are not only convincing in their own right but are seamlessly and intelligently blended together, a cleverly edited and very stylish early sequence has Ofelia trying to calm her kicking unborn brother with a story as the camera pans down to show the baby's foetus and then across to the beautiful flower in a field of thorns from Ofelia's story and then follows the insect-like fairy back into the room with Ofelia and her mother. The special effects and editing here are superb and this mixing of reality and story gains the appearance of happening in a single tracking shot. As would be expected from the director of Hellboy, the art direction and design in the fantasy scenes is amazing. The finest such sequence comes courtesy of the Pale Man, a figure who has dominated all the pre-publicity for the film and yet, sat totally still at a table with a great feast and his eyeballs on a plate beside him, he cuts a brilliantly disturbing and strange figure the like of which we have never seen; and that is before he gets up, inserts the eyeballs into the palm of his hands and staggers after the terrified Ofelia. The faun, meanwhile, is no friendly, bumbling Mr. Tumnus, but an imposing, sinister figure who we are never entirely sure is worthy of our trust. He is also a creature that appears truly to be a part of nature, seeming to emerge from the rocks of his labyrinth when he first appears, when he describes himself as the mountains and the earth and the woods, he really looks like it. The majority of the film, however, occurs not in the fantasy world of the labyrinth but the very real world of the house of Captain Vidal. Played with great skill by Sergi Lopez, the captain is a terrific and yet very real kind of evil, a man who wants everything to be perfectly ordered and is pained by the notion of anything not being just as he desires it. Even his brutal torture method must follow a set pattern and script each time. Vidal's love of rigorous routine is further displayed in the classic Del Toro motif of clockwork as the captain is seen constantly winding his watch, a reminder also that he lives perpetually in the shadow of his father, a military hero whose watch stopped at the exact time of his death, a symbol to show his son how a great man dies. This, of course, raises another significant point about Vidal. He is, essentially, a small man, a man who is dedicated to following orders (the wrongness of blindly following orders is a further anti-Fascist theme of the film, contrasting the doctor's remarks on Vidal's never questioning attitude to Ofelia's reactions to the faun wanting her to do whatever he says). In the small world of the film he may seem like the great evil but he is just a small part of a rotting society. As the hiding rebels say, they may get rid of Vidal but Franco can always send another in his place. The real world of Pan's Labyrinth is a dark one, not just in the grim, gruesome violence dealt out by Captain Vidal but in the sense of being trapped here and, as voiced by Ofelia's mother, the feeling that this difficulty is the way that the world is. There is little wonder, therefore, that Ofelia retreats into the fantasy world offered by the faun. Del Toro leaves his audience in doubt as to whether this world is real or a product of Ofelia's troubled imagination, giving suggestions either way in the course of the film. With her stack of story books and the way she instantly perceives the strange insect creature as a fairy, Del Toro certainly gives his heroine an imagination he can relate to. While the usage of another book, blank until she fills it with her touch, as Ofelia's link her fantasy world tasks suggests the director's love of the power of stories. Real or otherwise, Ofelia sees her tasks as an escape from the imposing world of Vidal's house. She feels isolated, alone and misunderstood with her mother ill and in bed, her new stepfather unconcerned and no other children, so she jumps at the chance to prove herself to the faun. When he leaves after her failure to follow the rules she is broken and when he gives her one last chance it gives her new life. Del Toro's real strength in this film is not the visual creativity he normally brings as a director but the human emotional impact that he creates here as a writer. Ofelia, in a brilliant, charming and winning performance from young Ivana Baquero, is a heroine who really engages the audience's sympathies. Creative, resourceful and brave, she is a likable character whose feelings of being lost and alone among this dark, grown up world anybody who has been a child can relate to in some way. The fact that Baquero's performance shows her as obviously scared and yet managing to conquer her fears and go forward to complete her tasks, especially evident in the toad scene, makes Ofelia believable and yet heroic and Pan's Labyrinth more than just a dark fairy tale for adults. It is a powerful emotional piece and the final scenes will bring a tear to your eye. A film that deserves to be seen by everyone not just the small audiences that normally frequent subtitled pictures, Pan's Labyrinth is not just Del Toro's finest film but the finest film by any director this year.