The Magical Helps Us Endure the Mundane and the Brutal
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth (2006) is a Spanish-language film that was nominated for six Academy Awards and won three: Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Makeup. The movie brilliantly intercuts between a brutal, mundane, hyperreal world and a magical, surreal realm. In the film, del Toro shows how myths, fables and fairy tales permit us to resolve the unresolvable.
In Pan's Laybrinth, del Toro creates two fully realized worlds, both with a level of detail that makes them come vividly to life. One is a drab, cruel corner of 1944 rural Spain where civil war still smolders. The other is a vibrant, strange supernatural place populated by wonderful, though sometimes dangerous, creatures. The movie achieves enormous emotional and intellectual resonance by cleverly interleaving interrelated stories in these two parallel worlds. The film leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not the supernatural world is imaginary, and the poetic power of the movie is greatly enhanced by the way del Toro uses ambiguity and duality.
Ofelia's Dreadful Real World
The central character in Pan's Labyrinth is a prepubescent girl named Ofelia, played by 11-year-old Ivana Baquero in one of the best performances by a child actor you'll ever see. The film's villain is Ofelia's brutish stepfather, Captain Vidal, who is portrayed so convincingly by Sergi López that he makes you cringe.
The more realistic part of the movie takes place five years after the ruthless dictator Francisco Franco won the Spanish civil war, but there remain pockets of Republican insurgency. In an outlying woodland, Captain Vidal commands a small army unit ordered by the Franco government to get rid of guerrillas who are operating in the area. We see him summarily execute local farmers and watch his grisly torture of a captured rebel.
After Ofelia's father died in the war, her mother married Vidal. As the story gets underway, the malevolent captain brings his wife and young stepdaughter out to live with him. The girl is miserable living in this small military garrison, but she makes one friend, Vidal's housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú). However, Ofelia's position is made difficult when she sees indications that Mercedes is secretly working with the insurgents.
Ofelia's Exciting Magical World
Early in Pan's Labyrinth, Ofelia encounters a long-bodied, winged insect that later transforms itself to look like a storybook fairy. The insect guides the girl to an ancient labyrinth where she meets a faun, a creature that is half goat, half man. The faun tells Ofelia she is a princess, but she will have to prove herself by accomplishing three tasks.
Eventually, the heroine gets an ugly giant toad to vomit up a key, has a frightening encounter with a faceless ogre called the Pale Man, and soaks a mandrake root in fresh milk and blood until it turns into something resembling a live little man. But one of the interesting things about del Toro's story is that Ofelia actually fails two of the three tests set for her by the faun.
An intriguing question raised by the movie is whether or not del Toro wants us to believe that the film's magical world exists outside of Ofelia's imagination. But many viewers may find it more satisfying to bypass that question and think of Ofelia's story as a metaphor for transcendence.
The Film Has Nothing to Do With the Greek God Pan
In the movie, the goatlike creature is always referred to as the faun, never Pan. And on the DVD, del Toro categorically states, both in his feature-length audio commentary and in the featurette "The Power of Myth," that the character of the faun in his movie is not Pan.
Del Toro's title for his film is El Laberinto del fauno, which translates from Spanish into English as The Faun's Labyrinth. But a faun (a Roman mythical creature that is half goat, half man) can be confused with a fawn (a young deer), and presumably this prompted a title change for the American market. Whatever the reason, somewhere along the way del Toro's faun was conflated with Pan, a Greek god who has goatlike features, and the movie became known to English speakers as Pan's Labyrinth.
However, this English-language title is misleading: in mythology Pan is generally depicted as lustful and is often associated with amorous affairs and sexuality, but this does not describe del Toro's faun at all.
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