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Magic from Spain’s Tim Burton
Pan’s Labyrinth
Directed by Guillermo Del Torres
Certificate 15
THIS wonderfully created and imaginative offering from director Guillermo Del Torres delves in to a child’s imagination as a means of escaping the cruel world she finds her elders have bequeathed her.
Set in Spain in 1944, it tells the story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) a young girl whose world is shaken by the brutality of adults.
Her widowed mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) has married Vidal, a captain in Franco’s victorious and posturing fascist army, a man for whom violence is a way of life
His mission for the state is to murder any suspected Reds, while his personal aim is to lord it over any one unfortunate enough to have personal relations with him.
Ofelia’s and her mother move into her stepfather’s rambling Mill house, where he rules with a jackboot, mimicking in his domestic life the life of a fascist state.
Ofelia is befriended by kindly housekeeper Mercedes. She is an oracle – and it is because of her that Ofelia discovers a secret labyrinth at the bottom of the neglected garden which she enters to fulfil her destiny.
In this alternative reality she meets Faun (Doug Jones) who lays out a number of tasks for her to achieve to prove she is a lost princess from the secret realm.
If she succeeds, she can reclaim her birthright and return to the fantasy land that she left hundreds of years ago. And while this is taking place, her step father is orchestrating a brutal hunting down of the remnants of the Republicans hiding in the woods and the countryside near-by. By using the harshness of a world dominated by a fascist bully intertwined with the pureness of a secret quest leaping from an innocent imagination, Pan’s Labyrinth is a quirky and original tale which appeals on different levels.
It opens the idea of imagination as a means of escape from abuse, and pays testimony tot he power of the human mind to overcome physical suffering.
Using great effects, which draw on influences such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, Del Torres has made a visually charming film with layers of darkness and evil lurking beneath.
The carefully told and uplifting story traces a conflict to confront the evil lurking in both Ofelia’s imagination and the reality of Spain in 1944.
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