The Faun’s Labyrinth

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A few friends of mine suggested that I should be blogging with more abandon, frequency. Here goes…
Last night I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, on DVD though I wish I had seen it in theaters. Most striking about the film was the extent to which it brought back a nostalgia for those post-fascist Spanish films of the 70s, particularly those starring a young Ana Torrent, every time cast in a role that fronts her as emblematic of a new Spain. Ivana Baquero, the actress who plays Ofelia in Toro’s film, looks in every way like Ana Torrent, an underscore to Toro taking his place as a contemporary contributer to the genre of political film tempered with the fantasy world of children commenced in Spain by Victor Erice and Carlos Saura. Like Saura and Erice, Toro is careful not to construct the underworld of childhood as an escapist fantasy, rather, he illuminates its most terrifying elements, the gigantic quality of the world, the monstrosities endorsed and made possible by a belief in magic. Indeed the monstrous elements of Ofelia’s world alternately recall Alice in Wonderland (hence the dress her mother sews for her, a version in green of Alice’s blue frock), and the world of Ana Torrent’s character in Erice’s 1973 El Espiritu de la Colmena. Ana’s (also the name of Erice’s character) escape from an oppressive family and countryside life in post-civil war Spain is tempered by a secret friend, a “monster” she finds in a woodshed based largely on James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” the movie which is the first she encounters in her entire life, (and by she I mean the actress and the character, Erice cast Ana Torrent because she had reputedly never seen a motion picture - the look on her face of utter and genuine disbelief when she joins the other children for the screening of “Frankenstein” recalls the face of Ofelia at many moments in Pan’s Labyrinth).
Ana’s fascination rather than horror with the monster she encounters in Whale’s film and later summons in the old shed after her sister, Isabel, tells her that the movie’s monster is still alive (a fugitive soldier finds the shed after jumping off a train and serves the role of the “monster”), is reminiscent of the sometimes impossible-seeming unsquimishness and fearlessness of Ofelia in Toro’s film. It also recalls the immortality of fantasy essential to both films, the endurance of belief in the impossible stretched to the limits of audacity; in each case, the child’s will to fascination overcomes her fear of annhilation and eventually anhilation itself - Frankenstein’s proclivity to kill the little girl in the film doesn’t stop Torrent from befriending him just as Ofelia cannot resist eating of the banquet’s offerings under the ominous ceiling panels that depict the “inhuman” monster’s taste for children, a monster her transgression will awaken.
The benevolent monstrosities of Ofelia’s world are matched in Pan’s Labyrinth with those real monstrosities perpetrated by her step-father, the brutal fascist military captain. When the captain is shot at the end of the film, a bullet pierces his face just beneath his eye, giving him the cyclopic quality of the “fauno,” ruler of the labyrinth, himself. The ocular parallel between the captain and Pan extends to their role in disseminating tasks and orders; the trivial missions upon which Pan sends Ofelia bleakly correspond to the sadistic means the Captain has of extracting information from captured guerrillas or the tests he puts forth whose consequences are always pain and death. This parallel collapses at the end and the most important thing seems to be overcoming that cruel aspect of innocence that encourages following orders without question; the doctor’s final lines to the Captain chide him for not being able to think for himself, just as, contrary to the captain’s orders, he’s put a tortured guerrilla out of his misery with a lethal injection. But, Ofelia, unwilling to “sacrifice the blood of an innocent,” proves her ability to do what her step-father can’t - her innocence is no excuse and neither is her trust of Pan. Questioning the monstrous consists not only of seeing beyond aesthetic monstrosity, but also of the willingness to make aesthetic and social allegiences solid yet provisional. Cinema is key in giving Erice’s Ana this prerogative and the cinematic opulance of Toro’s film is synonymous with the magic of innocence, a magic that is also willing to turn on innocence itself in light of its potential to be exploited.

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Filed under Aesthetics, Politics, film