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Pan's Labyrinthe
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cjlasky and I had sushi and went to see the flick Pan's Labyrinthe by Guillermo del Toro from his original screenplay. As you may or may not already know, and if you don't know you probably don't care (which I completely understand, feel much the same way at the moment) - Pan's Labyrinthe is nominated for several Oscars amongst them: original screenplay, best foreign language film, best cinematography, best makeup, best art direction, and best original score. And yes, I'd say it deserves all those nods, and should win at least a few of them - specifically makeup and art direction, if not screenplay and film.
The movie reminds me a great deal of some of Neil Gaiman's works such as Neverwhere and Mirrormask, and to a degree, some of the Japanese Anime filmmakers - behind works such as Howl's Moving Castle, and Grave of Butterflies. Yet, it is far darker than those films and at times bleaker. It is also more horrific. Not a movie for the easily squeamish, I shut my eyes at different points, unable to watch what was portrayed on screen. Cringing away from it in both horror and digust. Yet it is at the same time a beautiful film in the same way gothic art can be beautiful. Each bit and piece, detailed, and perfectly rendered. Flawless.
The ending of Pan's Labyrinthe is both bleak and uplifting, which is impossible to explain without giving it away, hence the spoiler warning. The film plays a bit like Wizard of OZ or Bjork's Dancer in The Dark, in the sense that as an audience, we can't quite be sure if the fantasy world the protagonist, a little girl named, Ofelia, enters is real or imaginary. It may in fact be both - which is what I think the filmmaker suggests - stating much as Frank L. Baum did about OZ and other's have, most recently, Star Trek the Next Generation and Dancer in The Dark - how can we know what is real or is not, do we not create our own realities as our means of handling our own world, our own pain? Ofelia much like the character Bjork plays in Dancer, retreats from her bleak existence into fantasy, except unlike Bjork's character - Ofelia's fantasy world is far from uplifting, musical, or happy. It is a nightmarish world populated by bugs, evil toads, monsters that devour children, puzzels and labrynthes - her tasks remind one of the tasks in greek myths such as the Cupid and Psyche story or the Minotaur. And indeed the fairy tales she's telling herself is similar to those tales - a human child with an immortal soul, the lost daughter of the King of the Underworld, who must complete three tasks in order to return to her underworld kingdom. A tale she's pulled out of a book she's reading on ride to her stepfather's domain.
Ofelia's stepfather, called the Captain, is a fascist military leader - riding roughshod over a small territory in Spain. He is in a way a king - ruling over the populace of the small outlying towns and villages with an iron hand. Sadistically enforcing his code of law.
And when Ofelia is introduced to the servants under him, she makes a point of contradicting her invalid and ailing mother - that she is not the Captain's daughter biologically, her true father was a mere tailor. This man she bears no allegiance to and has no bonds to outside of those her mother, without her permission, has enforced upon them. Her mother is sick with the Captain's child. A fitting metaphor in of itself for how the village, servants, and surrounding enivronment feel under his reign. We soon learn that the Captain cares for nothing but his "child" and his "power". Telling the doctor to sacrifice his wife for the child if and when such a choice must be made. He is cruel to everyone else, lashing, whipping, beating and shooting people to death and the filmmaker does not spare us these acts, we see them in bloody detail, at times cutting away just before the final bloody punch or saw. If you can't handle watching a boxing match, I do not recommend this film to you, because you'll spend most of it looking away. The images are so well crafted that if you don't look away and actually watch, they will stay imbedded for days afterwards. This is not a film for people who can't handle a certain level of violence, particularly sadistic violence.
That said, it is, as I stated above, a beautiful film. Which is odd I know. But there are images that are so well crafted and put together that they are indeed art, much like the images in say Gaiman's Mirrormask, or Hellboy, or that you might find in a book of dark fantasy art. One such image is of a monster who uses his hands literally as his eyes and stumbles upon a mazelike corridor after the girl Ofelia as a small mudblack fairy hovers next to her, the other two fairies brutally devoured. I saw the film two days ago and still see that image in my head, so perfectly rendered.
The fairy story - told to us first in the book then again by a Faun, a dark character, who looks different from any Faun you've seen. As if a child scratched him out on rough paper with chalk and charcoal, then fashioned him out of stone and wood. He moves as if he is made of wood and dirt, in jagged movements, old, and crumbling. The Faun tells us that Ofelia is Princess Mona, the daughter of the king of the underworld, lost ages ago, and in order to return to her father she must complete three complicated and dangerous tasks - once completed, the portal will open and she can return to her family underground. It is the reverse telling of the Greek stories, about the girl who wants to escape the underworld king or ascend to heaven. Here, Ofelia hopes to descend, and hell rather than being below ground is above. The underworld King is better than the Captain. The fairy story at the beginning of the film tells us that Mona was lost, because she dreamed of sunlight and sky and butterflies and flowers and left her underworld kingdom to join the land of the living - only to experience pain, horror, and suffering and eventually die. She has now, according to the fairy story, been reborn, legend has it, in the form of a young girl. And those in the underworld eagerly await her return - opening stone and earth portals around the world, this he points out, is amongst the last of them.
So who is the king of the underworld - the king of the dead? Her dead father. The tailor.
Who her mother soon joins, when she dies in childbirth. Each task requires her to go beneath the earth - first underneath a dead tree into the mud and muck and black beetles, which feed off and recycle dead trees, to insert three stones in a god-awful toad who is eating all the bugs that are recyling the tree, destroying the area around it - converting it to muck. While she does this the Captain is shown brutally shooting three men in the woods who have merely hunted some young rabbits. And humilating her mother at a dinner party after she tells a romantic tale of how they first met.
The second is to journey beneath her home into the lair of a subhuman monster, who sits sightless at a table covered with fruit and other rationed food - more than anyone can imagine, on the walls are pictures of him devouring children and in a pile next to the table are the clothes of those children. On the table on a plate are his eyes and next to them his hands face down. He sits still as a statue. Her goal is to use a key to unlock a cabinet to retrieve a knife. While she works on this task - we see the Captain sitting at a sumptious feast discussing the penalties for breaking rations and how hard to ration the villagers, how they need to give up more food with his cronies and his servant, who serves him the food, copying the key he's given her to the food storage sheds to the resistance.
But both the servant, Mercedes (the other protagonist and point of view of the piece, who early on warns Ofelia to beware of Faun's and tells her that she too once believed in such things as a child. Children can see them. Adults can't) - and Ofelia fail in their tasks.
A rebell is caught and tortured and finally killed. Mercedes thinks the rebel is her brother Pedro (as does the audience, primarily me), but according to the shooting script realizes it isn't. (A possible flaw in the film is this is not that clear?)***Ofelia's mother dies tortously in childbirth. Ofelia is abandoned by the Faun. Mercedes by the resistance. They attempt to escape together, but are caught. Ofelia put in a locked room and informed if she leaves she will be shot. Mercedes taken to the storage shed to be tortured.
The third and final task - is to sacrifice the blood of an innocent. The Faun tells Ofelia she must let him kill her brother in his labrynthe under the full moon in order to complete the ritual. Meanwhile Mercedes is faced with either giving up the resistance or fighting back. She chooses the latter. Both end up in the stone and earth labryinthe along with the Captain. Ofelia to use her baby brother to open the portal to underworld, the Captain to kill Ofelia and take the baby from her, and Mercedes to rescue Ofelia and the little boy
The film ends oddly in that it is neither a happy nor a sad ending, but rather a little bit of both. Realistic. Bleak. And Uplifting. The monster is defeated, but innocent blood had to be sacrificed to do so - in this case, willingly so. The child graduates. In some aspects the ending reminded me a great deal of the ending of Buffy Season 5, the themes were similar as were the actions of the two protagonists. In BTVS, if you never watched it, the heroine leaps off a tower to save her sister/child, it is either her or her sister, and in doing so, manages somehow to close the portals. Her friends and soliders kill the monster that caused her to jump, and take care of the child she's left behind, while she enters the afterlife - a place that is warm and welcoming. Here, at the end of Pan's Labyrinth the opposite happens, Ofelia sacrfices herself for her brother, she refuses to hand him over to the Faun, instead is shot by her step-father who takes him. It is her blood not her brother's that falls onto the portal, opening it in her minds eye - so she can at last enter the underworld kingdom of her true father, where her mother sits, and she is warm and welcomed. Having made, the Faun tells her, the honorable choice, sacrificing her own life over her brother's. The child is ultimately left with Mercedes and the resistance, who kill the monster (The Captain) and walk away.
But it is not so simple, there's the Captain's arc, the third point of view, or the monster.
Whose issues with his own father may in fact inform his own monstrousity. Raising the age-old question can we blame our parents for who we become? Del Torro does not appear to think so.
If anything the Captain's father was an honorable man (**please note this is from the Captain's point of view and his cronies - as in a military man who died a military man's honorable death - from our perspective and the villagers - the Captain's father was probably just another monster.) where the Captain is not and it is his own inability to be honorable that causes his rage. His inability to live up to his father's legacy. A legacy he attempts to pass on to his son, but which the resistance fighters deny him, stating that his son will not know his name or that he even existed. It is the worst punishement they can inflict, the punishment of erasure. If we erase you, we strip you of power and influence over us - make you in effect inconsequential. While Ofelia, Mercedes weeps over, singing a lullaby, honoring the little girl's life. And Ofelia's influence, the narrator states is felt long after she's left that plain - with a white flower blooming on the branch of a long dead tree trunk, where her new dress once hung. The final image in the film as sunlight streams across the screen. Prior to this final scene, the film is cast in dark navy tones and blacks and grays, few bright colors, outside of maybe red, and everything dulled. Dark and rainy and overcast as if a pall hangs over the land. But after the finale, it is cast in lighter tones, and we see sunlight.
Pan's Labyrinthe may well be amongst the best films I've seen in a while. It is certainly the best I've seen so far this year, which is saying something - considering the last couple were nominated for awards as well, and just as thought provoking. But unlike Notes on A Scandel and Dreamgirls, Pan's Labyrinthe feels flawless in its execution. Granted it is not an easy film to watch and not necessarily "enjoyable", but it does haunt long after the final credits and plays with the mind. Not a film for children or the squeamish, nor escapist fare. But definitely worth the price of admission.
[Updates: *changed as a response to comments below. ** clarified in response to comments below. Sorry for any errors, while watching the film, I was somewhat distracted by real life events in my own life that had happened earlier in the day that obviously took precedence. So may have missed a couple of bits and pieces. It's a film that begs to be re-watched, but due to the graphic violence and harsh imagery, not one I think I can. Another point, the film is murky in places and I think flawed - in that it is not always clear who the rebels are, this may be due to the three points of view, but it is also due to Del Torro's preoccupation with art direction in my opinion.]
cjlasky and I had sushi and went to see the flick Pan's Labyrinthe by Guillermo del Toro from his original screenplay. As you may or may not already know, and if you don't know you probably don't care (which I completely understand, feel much the same way at the moment) - Pan's Labyrinthe is nominated for several Oscars amongst them: original screenplay, best foreign language film, best cinematography, best makeup, best art direction, and best original score. And yes, I'd say it deserves all those nods, and should win at least a few of them - specifically makeup and art direction, if not screenplay and film. The movie reminds me a great deal of some of Neil Gaiman's works such as Neverwhere and Mirrormask, and to a degree, some of the Japanese Anime filmmakers - behind works such as Howl's Moving Castle, and Grave of Butterflies. Yet, it is far darker than those films and at times bleaker. It is also more horrific. Not a movie for the easily squeamish, I shut my eyes at different points, unable to watch what was portrayed on screen. Cringing away from it in both horror and digust. Yet it is at the same time a beautiful film in the same way gothic art can be beautiful. Each bit and piece, detailed, and perfectly rendered. Flawless.
The ending of Pan's Labyrinthe is both bleak and uplifting, which is impossible to explain without giving it away, hence the spoiler warning. The film plays a bit like Wizard of OZ or Bjork's Dancer in The Dark, in the sense that as an audience, we can't quite be sure if the fantasy world the protagonist, a little girl named, Ofelia, enters is real or imaginary. It may in fact be both - which is what I think the filmmaker suggests - stating much as Frank L. Baum did about OZ and other's have, most recently, Star Trek the Next Generation and Dancer in The Dark - how can we know what is real or is not, do we not create our own realities as our means of handling our own world, our own pain? Ofelia much like the character Bjork plays in Dancer, retreats from her bleak existence into fantasy, except unlike Bjork's character - Ofelia's fantasy world is far from uplifting, musical, or happy. It is a nightmarish world populated by bugs, evil toads, monsters that devour children, puzzels and labrynthes - her tasks remind one of the tasks in greek myths such as the Cupid and Psyche story or the Minotaur. And indeed the fairy tales she's telling herself is similar to those tales - a human child with an immortal soul, the lost daughter of the King of the Underworld, who must complete three tasks in order to return to her underworld kingdom. A tale she's pulled out of a book she's reading on ride to her stepfather's domain.
Ofelia's stepfather, called the Captain, is a fascist military leader - riding roughshod over a small territory in Spain. He is in a way a king - ruling over the populace of the small outlying towns and villages with an iron hand. Sadistically enforcing his code of law.
And when Ofelia is introduced to the servants under him, she makes a point of contradicting her invalid and ailing mother - that she is not the Captain's daughter biologically, her true father was a mere tailor. This man she bears no allegiance to and has no bonds to outside of those her mother, without her permission, has enforced upon them. Her mother is sick with the Captain's child. A fitting metaphor in of itself for how the village, servants, and surrounding enivronment feel under his reign. We soon learn that the Captain cares for nothing but his "child" and his "power". Telling the doctor to sacrifice his wife for the child if and when such a choice must be made. He is cruel to everyone else, lashing, whipping, beating and shooting people to death and the filmmaker does not spare us these acts, we see them in bloody detail, at times cutting away just before the final bloody punch or saw. If you can't handle watching a boxing match, I do not recommend this film to you, because you'll spend most of it looking away. The images are so well crafted that if you don't look away and actually watch, they will stay imbedded for days afterwards. This is not a film for people who can't handle a certain level of violence, particularly sadistic violence.
That said, it is, as I stated above, a beautiful film. Which is odd I know. But there are images that are so well crafted and put together that they are indeed art, much like the images in say Gaiman's Mirrormask, or Hellboy, or that you might find in a book of dark fantasy art. One such image is of a monster who uses his hands literally as his eyes and stumbles upon a mazelike corridor after the girl Ofelia as a small mudblack fairy hovers next to her, the other two fairies brutally devoured. I saw the film two days ago and still see that image in my head, so perfectly rendered.
The fairy story - told to us first in the book then again by a Faun, a dark character, who looks different from any Faun you've seen. As if a child scratched him out on rough paper with chalk and charcoal, then fashioned him out of stone and wood. He moves as if he is made of wood and dirt, in jagged movements, old, and crumbling. The Faun tells us that Ofelia is Princess Mona, the daughter of the king of the underworld, lost ages ago, and in order to return to her father she must complete three complicated and dangerous tasks - once completed, the portal will open and she can return to her family underground. It is the reverse telling of the Greek stories, about the girl who wants to escape the underworld king or ascend to heaven. Here, Ofelia hopes to descend, and hell rather than being below ground is above. The underworld King is better than the Captain. The fairy story at the beginning of the film tells us that Mona was lost, because she dreamed of sunlight and sky and butterflies and flowers and left her underworld kingdom to join the land of the living - only to experience pain, horror, and suffering and eventually die. She has now, according to the fairy story, been reborn, legend has it, in the form of a young girl. And those in the underworld eagerly await her return - opening stone and earth portals around the world, this he points out, is amongst the last of them.
So who is the king of the underworld - the king of the dead? Her dead father. The tailor.
Who her mother soon joins, when she dies in childbirth. Each task requires her to go beneath the earth - first underneath a dead tree into the mud and muck and black beetles, which feed off and recycle dead trees, to insert three stones in a god-awful toad who is eating all the bugs that are recyling the tree, destroying the area around it - converting it to muck. While she does this the Captain is shown brutally shooting three men in the woods who have merely hunted some young rabbits. And humilating her mother at a dinner party after she tells a romantic tale of how they first met.
The second is to journey beneath her home into the lair of a subhuman monster, who sits sightless at a table covered with fruit and other rationed food - more than anyone can imagine, on the walls are pictures of him devouring children and in a pile next to the table are the clothes of those children. On the table on a plate are his eyes and next to them his hands face down. He sits still as a statue. Her goal is to use a key to unlock a cabinet to retrieve a knife. While she works on this task - we see the Captain sitting at a sumptious feast discussing the penalties for breaking rations and how hard to ration the villagers, how they need to give up more food with his cronies and his servant, who serves him the food, copying the key he's given her to the food storage sheds to the resistance.
But both the servant, Mercedes (the other protagonist and point of view of the piece, who early on warns Ofelia to beware of Faun's and tells her that she too once believed in such things as a child. Children can see them. Adults can't) - and Ofelia fail in their tasks.
A rebell is caught and tortured and finally killed. Mercedes thinks the rebel is her brother Pedro (as does the audience, primarily me), but according to the shooting script realizes it isn't. (A possible flaw in the film is this is not that clear?)***Ofelia's mother dies tortously in childbirth. Ofelia is abandoned by the Faun. Mercedes by the resistance. They attempt to escape together, but are caught. Ofelia put in a locked room and informed if she leaves she will be shot. Mercedes taken to the storage shed to be tortured.
The third and final task - is to sacrifice the blood of an innocent. The Faun tells Ofelia she must let him kill her brother in his labrynthe under the full moon in order to complete the ritual. Meanwhile Mercedes is faced with either giving up the resistance or fighting back. She chooses the latter. Both end up in the stone and earth labryinthe along with the Captain. Ofelia to use her baby brother to open the portal to underworld, the Captain to kill Ofelia and take the baby from her, and Mercedes to rescue Ofelia and the little boy
The film ends oddly in that it is neither a happy nor a sad ending, but rather a little bit of both. Realistic. Bleak. And Uplifting. The monster is defeated, but innocent blood had to be sacrificed to do so - in this case, willingly so. The child graduates. In some aspects the ending reminded me a great deal of the ending of Buffy Season 5, the themes were similar as were the actions of the two protagonists. In BTVS, if you never watched it, the heroine leaps off a tower to save her sister/child, it is either her or her sister, and in doing so, manages somehow to close the portals. Her friends and soliders kill the monster that caused her to jump, and take care of the child she's left behind, while she enters the afterlife - a place that is warm and welcoming. Here, at the end of Pan's Labyrinth the opposite happens, Ofelia sacrfices herself for her brother, she refuses to hand him over to the Faun, instead is shot by her step-father who takes him. It is her blood not her brother's that falls onto the portal, opening it in her minds eye - so she can at last enter the underworld kingdom of her true father, where her mother sits, and she is warm and welcomed. Having made, the Faun tells her, the honorable choice, sacrificing her own life over her brother's. The child is ultimately left with Mercedes and the resistance, who kill the monster (The Captain) and walk away.
But it is not so simple, there's the Captain's arc, the third point of view, or the monster.
Whose issues with his own father may in fact inform his own monstrousity. Raising the age-old question can we blame our parents for who we become? Del Torro does not appear to think so.
If anything the Captain's father was an honorable man (**please note this is from the Captain's point of view and his cronies - as in a military man who died a military man's honorable death - from our perspective and the villagers - the Captain's father was probably just another monster.) where the Captain is not and it is his own inability to be honorable that causes his rage. His inability to live up to his father's legacy. A legacy he attempts to pass on to his son, but which the resistance fighters deny him, stating that his son will not know his name or that he even existed. It is the worst punishement they can inflict, the punishment of erasure. If we erase you, we strip you of power and influence over us - make you in effect inconsequential. While Ofelia, Mercedes weeps over, singing a lullaby, honoring the little girl's life. And Ofelia's influence, the narrator states is felt long after she's left that plain - with a white flower blooming on the branch of a long dead tree trunk, where her new dress once hung. The final image in the film as sunlight streams across the screen. Prior to this final scene, the film is cast in dark navy tones and blacks and grays, few bright colors, outside of maybe red, and everything dulled. Dark and rainy and overcast as if a pall hangs over the land. But after the finale, it is cast in lighter tones, and we see sunlight.
Pan's Labyrinthe may well be amongst the best films I've seen in a while. It is certainly the best I've seen so far this year, which is saying something - considering the last couple were nominated for awards as well, and just as thought provoking. But unlike Notes on A Scandel and Dreamgirls, Pan's Labyrinthe feels flawless in its execution. Granted it is not an easy film to watch and not necessarily "enjoyable", but it does haunt long after the final credits and plays with the mind. Not a film for children or the squeamish, nor escapist fare. But definitely worth the price of admission.
[Updates: *changed as a response to comments below. ** clarified in response to comments below. Sorry for any errors, while watching the film, I was somewhat distracted by real life events in my own life that had happened earlier in the day that obviously took precedence. So may have missed a couple of bits and pieces. It's a film that begs to be re-watched, but due to the graphic violence and harsh imagery, not one I think I can. Another point, the film is murky in places and I think flawed - in that it is not always clear who the rebels are, this may be due to the three points of view, but it is also due to Del Torro's preoccupation with art direction in my opinion.]
no subject
the storage shed? Because that's what she called the guy in the shed.
She kept saying "Pedro", "PEdro", "Pedro"...or did she realize it wasn't him?
It's the lover who shot Vidal then, right?
no subject
It's the *brother* who shot Vidal. There is no lover!
no subject
http://panslabyrinth.com/downloads/screenplay/PansLabyrinthEnglishScreenplay.pdf
Pages 50-51:
Mercedes takes a couple of steps... and suddenly, someone is there: it is Pedro, the young guerilla. He hugs her.
MERCEDES
Pedro, Pedro- My brother.
He kisses her on both cheeks. The Doctor looks around with alarm as twenty more men appear from out of the shadows.
Page 66:
The prisoner is Stutter.
Stutter and Mercedes look each other in the eye-
There is a mixture of relief and pity in Mercedes' eyes.
Because he's not her brother. Pedro is her brother. You read him as her lover instead, and mistook Stutter-guy for Mercedes's brother, but this is simply inaccurate.
no subject
I know why I was confused. What I saw was Mercedes coming to the shed screaming Pedro, seeing the prisoner, pained. The shed doors closing.
The next scene is of Mercedes depressed with the kitchen helpers and contemplating a way to get out of there. In short it may have been clear in the screenplay, but was not clear in the film to me. Then again I was admittedly distracted.
Thank you for the clarification.