The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Monday, August 28, 2006

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth is the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, director of Hellboy, Blade 2 and the Devil’s Backbone. It is a low budget, foreign language production that never once looks compromised by the lack of money nor is ever less than transparently captivating. It is one of the best films of the year, and you should do whatever you need to do to see it when it opens in America at the end of December.

It tells the story of 11 year old Ofelia who moves out to the Spanish countryside with her pregnant mother just after the civil war to be with her mother’s new husband, a Franco army captain, charged with rooting out the last of the rebels hiding in the hills.

Ofelia, on the cusp of puberty and looking a lot like the girl from Jeunet and Caro’s City of Lost Children, reads fairy stories, is told by her mother to stop reading fairy stories, and is visited by a giant bug that she thinks is a fairy.

And this begins a story juxtaposing Ofelia’s attempts to reclaim her position as the princess of a magical underground kingdom and Ofelia’s attempts to look after her mother, sick with pregnancy complications, in the increasingly dangerous real world.

It is Guillermo’s best film, it is as good as all the advanced word (and the 22 minute ovation at Cannes) has suggested and it is as riveting, terrifying and emotional as you could want a film to be. There’s also lots of cool fx work, scary monsters and very gruesome violence. For fantasy and horror geeks used to accepting, even championing, total crap as long as it’s full of blood, this is something of a holy grail.

It is not, however, a giant leap for del Toro. It has the same pre-occupations as his previous films, it looks like a cross between Hellboy and The Devil’s Backbone and, as del Toro freely admits, it is a sister piece, both thematically and structurally, to that latter film (as an in-joke, the actors who played the lead boys in Backbone now play Spanish rebels). The achievement here is the seamlessness with which all the strands of his work are brought together.

Films that play off of the distinction between fantasy and reality tend to annoy me - the ones that suggest the fantastical sequences are all in the protagonist’s mind, leading to interminable sequences of their friends telling them they are crazy and more interminable sequences where the protagonist becomes increasingly crazy trying to convince their friends the fantastical sequences are real. I do not need to see another scene where the character sees a monster then looks back only to realise it is a radiator. The use of the supernatural as a metaphor for mental illness is shallow, a ‘having your cake and eating it’ cheat and entirely misses the point of fantasy.

There are none of those cheats in Pan’s Labyrinth. Del Toro is using the real world/fantasy distinctions as metaphors for growing up, freedom vs repression, imagination vs dogmatism and a whole bunch more. The fantastic is treated as real and questions over whether Ofelia is just making it up are transmuted into questions over how we choose to live our lives.

This integration is shown in a short scene where Ofelia, flush from a success in the fantasy realm turns away from her mother, towards the book that will tell her what to do next. The ink of the book turns red and she is suddenly thrown back into the problems of the real world.

That the two worlds are not ontologically separated means del Toro can make much more play over what they mean, how they relate and, importantly, how they feel. All the sequences both real and fantasy are shown to the audience from the points of view of the various characters. The film deals with how they relate to those worlds, rather than th worlds themselves. There is a shoot-out between army and rebels that focuses almost entirely on the Captain rather than on the pyrotechnics. We discover the fantasy world entirely through the eyes of Ofelia. It is all character work, and so the film has a unity of tone and purpose far more rewarding than the schizophrenia those ‘is it/isn’t it’ films get stuck in.

In the end del Toro achieves nuances to the relationship between these worlds that most films utterly fail at or simply do not attempt. One viewing is not enough for me to write with any authority of them and, due to the lack of ‘This Is Good! This Is Bad!’ brow-beating sermonising, it is probably best that you discover and decide upon them yourselves.

The most useful touchstone for describing this film is Miyazaki, specifically Spirited Away. Whether Del Toro was actually inspired by that film, or deliberately cribbed bits from it, or not is not that relevant. That he has managed to create a live action fantasy film as transporting and as human as Miyazaki’s animated films, however, is probably the highest praise I can give.

Ralph Brown, who played Danny the drug dealer, put the popularity of Withnail & I down to it ‘not having any crap bits’. This is also a good way to describe Pan’s Labyrinth. It is not a bombastic film, nor a film constantly drawing attention to its qualities. The shots are not overly iconic, epic or self-consciously artistic. Del Toro has spoken of himself in interviews as a craftsman rather than an auteur. Equally the characterisation and acting is low key, mostly relying on behaviour rather than speeches or grandstanding theatrics.

These things mean that the film is not immediately gripping in the way a Kubrick or Coppola film can be. This film’s power is quiet and cumulative. The strength of this comes when the fantasy world is taken away, leaving only human drama, and the following half hour is the most gripping of the film.

Now, there is a lot of symbolism and metaphor at play in this film, which is in danger of bogging what is supposed to be an emotional character drama down in academic dialectics. The unexploded bomb in the playground, and for that matter the ghost, in The Devil’s Backbone is a great thunking metaphor for guilt, conscience and how dark secrets can not be forgotten that works to take the viewer out of the film.

The quiet, cumulative approach to characterisation does not help this. The Captain, when introduced, is nothing but a representation of fascism, the girl not much more than a cipher for youthful imagination. The Matrix sequels are good examples of what happens if you get too excited about treating the characters like symbolic chess-pieces instead of actual humans.

This dragging weight of Meaningfulness, which so often acts as an albatross to Important Dramas, is distancing at first. The framing device of storytelling (the film begins with a narrator telling us a fairy story) reinforces this.

But the seamlessness with which del Toro weaves these things together makes these criticisms empty. It is weighty without ever being portentous. It is fantastical but always human. It is dark but never morbid. It is utterly gripping, light on its feet and very emotional, a testament to the craftsmanship of the film-makers, the actors’ complete inhabiting of their roles and a script considerably more subtle that Del Toro’s previous work. It also, strangely for me, left me wanting to see it again straight away. It was not the exhaustive experience of most modern fantasy films, or the brutalising experience of modern ‘war is hell’ and horror movies.

It has many fx shots (around 300) but only a couple are overtly flashy. It has a great deal of violence, including scenes of torture, but it never rubs its or your noses in the gore. It gave me the light headed, overwhelmed feeling of a small story perfectly told, more like finishing a good book than watching the credits roll.

To avoid dipping too heavily to hyperbole, the film never escapes, not that it wants to, being a fairy story, and so is never quite as emotional as the Magnolias (insert favourite ‘weeping like a baby’ film here if you are foolish enough not to love Magnolia) of this world. I wasn’t crying at the end of this and, being a pussy, I even teared up towards the end of Spider-Man 2.

I saw this film at the London FrightFest Festival, and Del Toro asked as afterwards to whore it shamelessly to everyone we meet, and so this is what I am doing. This is not a studio backed blockbuster, and will not receive the marketing push even Hellboy had. It would be a very good thing if, after Hellboy 2, which I am sure will be a lot of fun, Guillermo Del Toro has the chance to make another film as personal and as wonderful as Pan’s Labyrinth.