Pan's Labyrinth, Tears and Fantasy
As an adolescent, I spent time yearning for the day I could shed off my childhood and emerge from that embarrassing shell, a confident adult. Now, in frequent daydreams I grope back in time trying to find a nugget of my former self within my thoughts. Why was I so fascinated by the feeling of sand slithering through my toes on days at the beach? How is it I could squeeze a day's play out of a metal rod I found lying in some corner of a library?
Pan's Labyrinth is not a film for children. It is rife with graphic violence--slit cheeks, gun-holed bodies. But we experience this violence through the imaginative lens of a young girl, Ophelia, and learn to think the way she thinks, reinterpreting death as coronation and populating sadness with frightening and mesmerizing creatures.
1944's century Spain is in the throws of civil war. Ophelia's mother overcome by necessity, and impregnated with Ophelia's brother, has followed her tyrannical husband to his army encampment. Ophelia runs after the flight of a praying mantis through the earthy greens of the surrounding forest. It leads her to an ancient labyrinth, and in the stone-reflected moonlight, a bark-featured faun bows before her. She is the lost princess of the kingdom below, and to return to her father, the King, she has to prove her valiance through three tasks.
In the daylight of the adult world, the explosions of rebel gun-shots and grenades near the encampment as the husband kills and tortures with increasing viciousness. At night, Ophelia is spurred onto her tasks by visits of the Faun. She imagines ever more fantastical stories to make sense of the escalating violence. Whether imagination can triumph of fate is a question that the movie leaves unanswered.
