TIFF Report: PAN'S LABYRINTH Review

Set at the close of the Spanish Civil War (or the End of WWII, my history is admittedly poor in this area), the film opens with Ofelia and her very pregnant mother traveling to an army outpost so that Ofelia’s stepfather can be present for the birth of their son. During a break in the travel, an innocent action from Ofelia reveals the presence of the faerie in the bright forested countryside. When they arrive at the outpost, crisply uniformed and neatly groomed fascist step-father awaits checking his pocket watch for timeliness. Captain Vidal is the epitome of European fascist warlord and is played by a perfectly cast Sergi López who perfected this sort of menace in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things and the Hitchcockian thriller With A Friend Like Harry. Vidal hosts a sumptuous banquet as he discusses rationing of the locals food so any extra will not fall into the hands of the rebels. He casually shoots anyone who may or may not be helping the rebels. He only cares about his wife insofar as she is the vessel for the wellbeing of his unborn son. Vidal barely notices Ophelia who is left to freely wander the grounds which include a stone maze, and a particularly vaginal tree, as well as endless miles of beautiful Spanish forest. Ophelia is well read, and quickly picks up on who in the camp is helping the rebels and why, although still being a child, wanders innocently and seemingly powerlessly around in the world of adults. When the faerie visits Ophelia again one night, she follows it out into the stone maze and meets a spectacularly gothic faun (the titular Pan) who tells Ophelia she is actually the princess of magical kingdom. To get to her kingdom she has to complete three tasks. The first of which is to find a key, the second to seem to involve her unborn brother.

Pan’s Labyrinth is blessed with Del Toro’s macabre visual style contrasted with the real horrors of a fascist squashing the last ragged remnants of freedom in the country. The fantastic element of the film is less than a fifth of the running time, but feels like exactly the right balance to maintain the sense of danger and the unforced dramatic tension. Both the straight grounded images of the camp and the curving, golden filtered (a Del Toro-ism) realms of the fantastic belie the films tiny budget. Things look at least as good as Hellboy. Young actress Ivana Baquero is easily as accomplished as Jennifer Connolly’s turn in another, significantly more quaint Labyrinth film. Del Toro, like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Terry Gilliam or Alice in Wonderland understands that children’s fairy-tales work best when they are actually menacing. Original visuals take cues from decidedly non children sources such as Chinatown and The Shining. Fair warning that there are scenes of terrifyingly bloody childbirth and the film is fond of the phrase “sick with baby” to describe a mothers discomfort an impending childbirth. Pan’s Labyrinth is a film that you might want to hold back from friends who are expecting. And perhaps you should let the kiddies discover this film into their teenage years; even then a nightmare or two will likely follow. It is a bit of a shame that such a rich story of innocence and and Christian sense of sacrifice with a fantasy bent is perhaps a tad too horrifying for the younger set who will have to stick with safe pap like the Harry Potter snooze fests and whitewashed Narnia. Since the story follows similar lines to the C.S. Lewis tale, Pan’s Labyrinth exposes the middle-brow Chronicles of Narnia as the thin hollow display of pageantry it is. The film goes all the way to celebrate the imagination, and that innocence lost upon entering adulthood (or a country in an unjust war) is worth fighting to regain at all costs, even it if innocence in the end can prove somewhat elusive. Sometimes it is better if Dorothy stays in Oz rather than return to Kansas, just so that someone is keeping the home fires burning. Pan’s Labyrinth is not without hope, whether in the context of the rise and fall of European fascism, or the more recent events in New York city five years ago, flowers of hope bloom after the passing of darkness.

If the gods are kind, this film will find an audience when it is released later on this year, but I think, much like Guillermo del Toro’s other masterpiece The Devil’s Backbone, this is a film that will be too smart for the Multiplex and will have to be recommended from knowing genre-fans DVD libraries years down the road.