FILM
REVIEW – PAN’S LABYRINTH.
See this. It’s great. An astonishing Spanish fantasy film set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, the Spanish Fascists have officially won, but leftwing factions are still operating a partisan resistance war from the hills. A brutal captain of guard is sent to deal with the crisis. His wife is going through a very difficult labour, so the Captain has her and her daughter brought across to his side so he can support them.
On the way, the daughter, (aged about twelve) finds an old pagan labyrinth maze. She is warned not to go into it, as people have got lost in there. The girl sees a large flying cricket, which seems to follow her. She convinces herself that it is a fairy.
Settling into the house, which the Captain has secured as his headquarters, the girl is amazed when the cricket reappears. She shows it a picture of a fairy in a picture book, and asks it if it is one. The cricket imitates the pose of the fairy, and then transforms itself fully into the shape given in the book.
The Captain of Guard proves how brutal he is when he takes on some rebels, shooting the men without mercy, often at point blank range. The wounded are simply slaughtered.
The young girl follows the fairy out of the house. It leads her to the Labyrinth. Where she meets the faun, Pan, a brilliantly realized creature of stone, mud and wood, with a very expressive and mischievous expression. Pan tells the girl that she is not of our world, but of his, and that to return to her former forgotten kingdom as a princess, she must perform three tasks. He convinces her that the father she thinks she has is not really her father, as she is a changeling.
The tasks will come to her from a book, which has no print or pictures on its blank pages.
The girl’s mother gives her a lovely new dress to wear, and this coincides with the book suddenly presenting instructions for the first task, - to feed a stone to a giant frog within the labyrinth. The path to the frog is extremely muddy, so the girl takes the dress off, and hangs it carefully on a tree, while she makes the journey in her underclothes. She ends up seriously covered in slime, and crawling with bugs. She finds the frog, which uses its tongue to pick the bugs right off the girl, and it takes the stone, (a n egg for a baby bug) and swallows that too. It gives the girl a key and disappears. The girl goes back out of the labyrinth and finds that her nice dress has been blown down by the wind into the mud, ruined.
The girl, Ofelia, is severely chastised by her ailing mother, but shortly afterwards the book gives the girl a vision of pools of blood. When the girl sees her mother now, she is in a near miscarriage crisis, with blood pouring down her thighs. The girl gets her Father, and he gets a local doctor to come and help, and for now, mother and baby are saved. However, the Doctor points out that the birth to come will not be easy. The Captain tells him that if it comes to a choice, he must save the baby and lose the mother.
The doctor has a secret, as does the serving girl called Mercedes, in that they are helping the rebels. Mercedes is having an affair with their leader.
Pan gives Ofelia a mandrake root, which she is to put into a bowl of milk and hide close to her mother, and add two drops of blood, to ease her mother’s recovery. Ofelia does this, and the mandrake root seems to come to life like a foetus. The mother now starts to recover, which baffles the doctor.
Ofelia now gets her next task. She must visit a large room, and open a certain lock, but she must not eat any of the food in the room, or she could die. Ofelia enters the room, using a chalk made door, and finds a massive lavish banquet laid on for her. The food makes her drool, as she, like everyone else, is living on rations controlled by her father. In the room, a strange creature sits at the end of the table. Its eyes are out of its head, lying on a late in front of it. Ofelia opens the locked box, which has nothing in it. However, as she leaves, she takes two grapes from the table and eats them. The blind creature of pure rage springs instantly to life. It picks up its eyes, which embed themselves in its hands, so that it can only see when it puts its hands in front of the eye-sockets. It captures two fairies are rips their heads off with its teeth. Ofelia escapes (only just) using her magic chalk to get to her own dimension. However, when she tells Pan what happened, he gets angry. She has failed in her task. He and his kind will now abandon her, he says, cursing her to the full horror of mortal existence, short and brutish as it is, with no hope of help from the magic kingdoms.
Ofelia’s life quickly falls apart. Her brother is born, but her mother dies in the birth. Soon afterwards, the lover of Mercedes is captured alive, and under torture, he talks. He is executed, as is the doctor who just saved the child being born, but Mercedes escapes to join the rebels, slashing the Captain’s face open with her knife as she goes.
Pan now returns to Ofelia, offering her one last chance to gain a place in his kingdom. She must bring her baby brother to him in the Labyrinth. Ofelia smuggles the baby out of the house as the rebels create havoc in retaliation for the death of their leader. They decimate The Captain’s forces and they are clearly winning the struggle in their area. The Captain gives chase to his daughter instead of helping the men with clear instructions or orders as to what to do, sealing their doom, as well as his own.
Pan asks Ofelia to give him the baby so he can take the sacrificial blood of an innocent. Ofelia refuses. Pan angrily denounces her again and leaves. Her father, the Captain, sees only Ofelia in this conversation. He demands his son back. Ofelia refuses to hand him over, shocked by her father’s malice to all around him. He casually shoots Ofelia and snatches the baby as she falls. As he leaves the Labyrinth, the rebels are waiting for him. He hands his child to Mercedes, begging her to remind the boy of the time he died, with pride. (He has always carried the broken watch that marked the time of his own father’s death). Mercedes shoots him and tells him as he dies that she will make sure the boy never even hears his name.
Ofelia dies, dreaming of her place in the Fairy Kingdom, as Pan whispers to her that she has died to save the innocent child. As the camera now moves over the landscape of our world, we are told that she has gone, leaving traces that will only be seen by those who know and believe and love – we see a tiny flower growing on the wood of an otherwise dead tree… End.
An incredible film on every level, with the stark horror of all too real war and fascism juxtaposed against the backdrop of an unsettling, but ultimately rewarding fantasy. Lovely acting, and some savage bursts of violence from The Captain, but a truly unforgettable classic.
Arthur Chappell
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