Pan's Labyrinth

[intertext]

This was an amazing movie; it's going to haunt my dreams. I was warned about the violence, and it was rather violent, but I didn't find it gratuitous. Strangely, I think I found the scene where the creature with the eyes in its hands ate the fairies almost worse than the casual brutality of the fascist captain - don't know why. I wasn't expecting it to be as sad as it was. I was glad I went with Kelly - we sat side by side, dumbstruck, sniffing and wiping our eyes at the end and that was okay. It had the most intense, sustained, uniform artistic vision of anything I've seen for a long time; there was nothing out of step, no unecessary subplots or side business. It was beautiful, brilliant, dreamlike: to coin a phrase, awesome.

There were things about it that I need to think about. I found it interesting that in many ways the morality of the fantasy world seemed more ambiguous than that of the "real" world - at least as it was presented in the film's vision. In the "real" world the good were good and the bad were BAD. I can't say a lot about how things worked themselves out without massive spoilers, but this ambiguity seems even more interesting when considered in light of the way some people are interpreting the fantasy world as Ofelia's "escape" from the "real" world. If the fantasy world is a reflection of the internal life or wish-fulfillment of a child, you'd think it would be more black and white.

I think it's a testament to how well fantasy, when it's presented with the kind of respect for audience that this film is, can treat serious themes, in fact can get to the heart of serious themes in ways that perhaps other genres can not.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Is it even 'real' and 'fantasy'? I was talking with a friend about this and said I thought it was magical realism more than straight fantasy. He (and he's kind of an expert-y type on this stuff) argued that MR is fantasy, which is true ...

But anyway, I don't think any of the fantasy part was ambiguous at all, except for the faun and the fairies. Their interactions with Ofelia are not ambiguous to anyone unused to the corpus of lit on fairy/faery interaction, but to someone who reads a lot of fantasy and myth, all of the "knowledge" we have about fairies makes it ambiguous. OTOH, while we are naturally going to see the Captain (Colonel?) as BAD (how can we not? History is on the filmmaker's side), I think it's clear that he is a true believer. He's very complex, and I think there's as much of his being a little man faced with living up to his family's reputation of honourable service as anything else. I admit, it gets iffy in the scenes I won't spoil, but even then, I never got the feeling he enjoyed any part of his cruelty except that it made him feel he was superior and reinforced his beliefs that he was on the side of Right.

Can't say more, because, well, spoilers. And I thought some of the violence bordered on gratuitous.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

WTF?? that was me. For some reason, LJ has taken to logging me out.

[superfoo.livejournal.com]

Ooo! I saw it last night too at Silvercity - it was so good! I loved the faun, but after the first task I was thinking he is so evil! I loved how he was all woody and crazy. And the thing who ate babies...holy crap that was right out of Silent Hill. I also didn't like when her mom threw the little mandrake root on the fire.

I also got really excited when the chick stabbed Captain Vidal. I was happy she didn't get tortured, but I was pretty sure he was going to rape her.

I want to see it again because it was so intense and well-done. I think this is a movie I will have to own.