Pan’s Labyrinth

This much praised film from Guillermo Del Toro is an adult’s dark fairy tale in which a young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) invents a fantasy world to protect her from the grim realities of adult life. In this case, adult life is the second world war and Spanish fascism as experienced at an isolated mountain outpost. The girl’s mother is the lover of a cruel army captain who mistreats his own soldiers and kills peasants on the slightest provocation. The girl is an obsessive reader, and the film leads one to suspect that her reading influences the world she invents. However, the film also never explicitly confirms that the fantasy world isn’t real. Only Ofelia can see and experience it—we know this from a scene late in the film where the girl is talking to a faun and the captain spies on her—all he can see is the girl talking to empty air. The entire tale itself has the air of fantasy, of magical realism. The captain is extreme in his cruelty. The rebel peasants are extreme in their virtue. It is never difficult to tell the good from the bad, with two exceptions--the only characters who seem initially ambiguous are the housemaid Mercedes and the doctor, both of whom work for the captain but who are actually in league with the rebels.

Adult life in the film manifests itself not only through the ongoing war and the evil captain but also through the relationship of the girl and her mother. At the film’s beginning, the mother is pregnant with the captain’s child. The captain has summoned her with her daughter to join him at his mountain outpost so he can be present at the child’s birth. It soon becomes clear that the woman is important to the captain only as the bearer of his child—at one point he tells someone, perhaps the doctor, if the woman or the child must be sacrificed, the child must be saved. The woman herself is entirely expendable, from his point of view, which means that her daughter’s situation is even more perilous. The girl’s mother seems at loose ends. She tells her daughter that she married the captain because she has been alone for so long, implying perhaps sexual isolation. Her pregnancy is a difficult one, and at one point she bleeds heavily, almost losing the baby. The girl herself is only a year or two away from puberty, on the verge of becoming her adult self, yet all the unpleasantness of adulthood she is exposed to in the film causes her to resist it fiercely. When her mother compels her to put on a overly formal child’s dress, she manages to ruin it during a walk in the rainy woods. The invented creatures of her imagination give her respite not only from the captain and war but as well from her own mother’s foolish doting and lack of understanding. She is a dark and unhappy Peter Pan.

The girl’s fantasies are populated with fairies (grasshoppers that turn into fairies), fauns, bloated giant frogs, a hideous monster that carries its eyes in its hands, magic, and heroic quests, possibly all of them dredged out of her readings. The faun tells the girl she may be a long lost princess and that she must carry out three tasks to prove her worthiness. It is interesting and surprising how in the end this test plays out—it is the most moving and in some ways surprising aspect of the film. The world of the girl’s fantasies is not a deeply realized digital creation—there is the slightest deliberate clumsiness to the fairies and the faun, as if they belong to a not wholly realized world, as if the girl’s imagination continued to invent and devise them as the film progresses. The film has no interest in overwhelming its audience with digitized effects. The faun, who begins as weak and hardly visible, undergoes several gradual transformations. Ultimately the faun becomes what the girl most longs for—a warm and loving father-figure who protects her from the evils of her own world and assures her that in the end she has been successful and virtuous in her quest. And she has been. The film ends with her act of heroism and sacrifice.

Pan’s Labyrinth is so neatly and tightly packaged that it lacks a certain spontaneity. It is a very well done film, in practically every aspect. It is not that the film is boring or without interest. The situation of the film—the girl and her mother, the evil captain in the mountain outpost, the war and the rebellion, the fantasy, the girl’s imagination—all hold the viewer’s attention. Is the problem that the outcome of the film is ordained from the start? In an American film, or a film designed for a more popular audience, there would be a clear victory in the end. The girl would survive and prevail. In this one, the grim realities of the adult world win out. Only in the girl’s imagination does she succeed in her heroic quest and ascend to the position of respect and personal confirmation she has longed for. The film leaves only the slightest hope that her fantasies are real, and that her victory does not die with her when the story ends. There is to an extent in this film a self-satisfied and smug insistence on proving—both to the audience and to the little girl—that the adult world is grim and cruel, that within it there is no hope or salvation or meaningful survival, that everything is dark and cruel and empty. Only the girl to her last breath insists on believing otherwise. But perhaps that is enough for her.

Her hope and optimism, her belief in the possibility of transcending the sordid realities of the adult world, of achieving some measure of nobility through a heroic and sacrificial act, is perhaps the only way in which human ideals of any sort survive in this film. It leaves little to sustain and encourage us—the girl’s mother, the good doctor, the girl, numerous rebels and soldiers are dead. Only the girl’s infant brother survives, and what he must face we cannot know. The film does have an ideological center, of course, and some might argue that human ideals survive in the struggle of the mountain rebels against the evil forces that the captain represents. Somehow that is not enough. But the film is its own justification—the film itself justifies those ideals whose absence it so sorrowfully reminds us of.