A mixed bag (Pan's Labyrinth (2 DVDs))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Pan's Labyrinth (2 DVDs)
Date:	14.12.06 (409 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A great story about Spanish fascism

Disadvantages: A less satisfying bunch of fantasy sequences

This is a review of the film only – it won’t be released on DVD for a few months, I guess. I think it’s still doing the rounds in cinemas at the moment.

Pan’s Labyrinth is set in Spain in 1944. Although the civil war is technically over, there are still Republican guerrillas at large in the North. A fascist captain has set up his base in a farmhouse surrounded by woods full of partisans. His pregnant wife and her 12-year-old daughter (from an earlier marriage) come to join him there. As he continues his campaign against the guerrillas, who have allies in his home, his step-daughter, Ofelia, discovers the entrance to a magical kingdom at the centre of a maze, and ends up running weird errands for some kind of faun.

It’s directed by Guillermo del Toro, a generally quite commercial director (whose previous films include Hellboy and Blade 2). Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t likely to be a huge box-office smash, though, as it’s all in Spanish (with subtitles) and doesn’t feature actors many people are going to have heard of. While it’s a shame that it won’t do as well as it perhaps deserves, I didn’t find it as satisfying as I’d hoped.

The film is beautifully shot. The direction is very good. The acting is impeccable. The script is excellent, for the most part (assuming the subtitles are translating it accurately). The main story – a family melodrama/war film – is completely compelling. But I really didn’t get on well with the fantasy side of things at all. Given that this is the main selling point of the film, overall I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly.

The fascists vs partisans storyline is, as I said, excellent. We get to see life on both sides. The left-wing rebels are warm, idealistic and utterly convinced they’ll win in the end. There’s a touching moment when they read about the Allied invasion of Normandy and assume that it will mean an end to their country’s plight. The most prominent of them is Mercedes, a servant at the Captain’s house, who smuggles supplies to her friends in the woods and is a likeable character. There’s perhaps a tendency to make the freedom fighters a bit too saintly, but they are characters you can care about without too much effort.

Set against them is the Captain (the only fascist who is really fleshed out). A great performance by Sergi López, he really is one of the best villains I’ve seen in anything for a long time. Vain, cruel and dangerous, he’s also a more rounded character than you might expect, showing admirable personal bravery in skirmishes. Rather unsubtle allusions are made to his personality being the result of his growing up fatherless (the point is hammered home relentlessly once it’s first been made), but that doesn’t detract from the acting. He’s probably the most compelling fascist villain I’ve seen since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List.

All this is splendid stuff – it mixes the personal and political in intelligent ways without being preachy or clumsy. The Captain’s wife only exists to carry his child, at least as far as he’s concerned, and he makes no effort whatsoever to bond with her daughter. Equally, Ofelia resents him, refusing to call him ‘father’. The two strands of the plot – the family soap opera and the war stuff – could have made for a great film.

But there’s all this rather irritating stuff about Ofelia hanging out with fairies, fauns and other fantastical creatures. Nothing against Ofelia – Ivana Baquero acts superbly, especially for a 12-year-old – but I just don’t see the point of it. It stops the film dead – just when things are getting interesting in the world of the Captain, we suddenly break off for five minutes to watch Ofelia messing around with mythical characters. The look of the mystical creatures is pretty good, and the faun is well acted. The CGI, however, is as bad as CGI always is. You’d think that by now they’d have either worked out a way to make CGI realistically integrate into films, or have stopped using it. At no point do the tiny fairies fluttering around look like they exist in the same world as Ofelia, and there’s a particularly stupid looking giant toad.

But my dissatisfaction extends beyond the special effects being poor. I just don’t see the point of the fantasy sequences at all. I assume they’re meant to represent Ofelia’s reactions to the adult world, with some sexually charged stuff thrown in as she’s obviously on the verge of puberty. But that’s all been done before, and much better (see Company of Wolves, or the Alice in Wonderland Jonathon Miller did for the BBC in the 60s). It’s also all a bit too reminiscent of comic book fantasy as represented by writers like Neil Gaiman. Maybe that’s why I didn’t enjoy it – I felt I’d seen it all before. I certainly didn’t feel engaged enough to try to figure out the symbolic meaning of everything.

However inventive the fantasy sequences are, they don’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. The two strands of the film kind of come together at the end, but only kind of, and the climax of the fantasy strand struck me as underwhelming. Basically, it’s two films stuck together, either of which could have been good by themselves, but which I don’t really see as belonging together. I’m left with the same slightly empty feeling I get from watching films by Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam – yes, there’s obviously a lot of imagination on display here, but so what?

I don’t know, probably I’m being too harsh. I’d normally expect to enjoy the (horror-tinged) fantasy stuff more, but instead I was gripped by the realistic storyline. It’s possibly still worth seeing, but it’s a frustrating experience because you feel there are two potentially good films in there, but only one of them works, and that’s diluted by the other one. I think perhaps my expectations were too high.

It’s a 15. There’s some pretty nasty violence, but it’s nasty because the people it’s happening to are quite loveable, rather than because it’s too gruesome. It could have been perfect – it’s well written, looks lovely and is very well acted. But that goddamn faun just gets in the way.

Summary: A bit of a missed opportunity