El Laberinto del fauno
May. 2nd, 2007 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberI finally saw "Pan's Labyrinth" tonight... Today was the last night it was at the Parkway so I biked over from work. I'm going to call it "El Laberinto del fauno" since Pan was nowhere in the movie. What a ridiculous retitling. As if one beast-legged thing was the same as the next. Criminy.
I wouldn't recommend seeing it; it was very black and very sad, and to my view, it didn't offer enough to offset that. There are many different takes on it, though; here are a few I've looked at since coming home. Below the spoiler-filled cut, I'll offer mine.
So, the faun was clearly bad. The entire fantasy was bad... Of course, the whole movie was black, lighting-wise and otherwise. But the fantasy: in the first three minutes Ofelia finds the eye of a statue and puts it back in. Already the creepy-factor in the lighting and soundtrack was was cranked, so I wasn't too sanguine about this. Someone had clearly taken a great deal of effort to carve the eye of that statue out... It's stone, fercryingoutloud. Reminiscent of Odin, who's a bad guy to deal with. I comforted myself that the eye part was only about 20 feet away, and if it was really a problem for the statue to see out properly, the carver would have taken the eyestone much father away. Anyway, the result is that from the gaping mouth of the statue bursts a ghastly bug bigger than her face: not usually a good sign. Ofelia does a good turn for a thing by the side of the road, and gets a hideous startling bug? Bad sign.
And the hideous bug is the best part of her fantasy for all but the last three minutes. Everything else is worse.
But back to the faun. It's the captain, her stepfather. I noted the first time the captain came on screen, ~Man, what is up with the sound mixing of this movie?!~ Creaking leather like a leather ship in a storm, loud as dialog. First time the faun came on screen: creaks like leather. Where would it be secreting leather about itself, eh? Beyond the soundtrack cues: it yells at her. It holds her chin in its fingers. It wants her to obey it without question or deviation. It sends her to wallow in the muck versus the captain wanting her to wallow in social milieu of his evil dinner guests. (It has a face like something out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though that's a bit besides the point...)
The faun offers her mandrake. I'm like ~Aa! No! It's definitely evil!~ I'm pretty sure that mandrake isn't one of those "dick around with it to make things nice" kinds of components. Not an herbalist, but I'm pretty sure mandrake is a poison and used to make horrible things... Figured the faun was using Ofelia to kill her mother. Mandrake goes into action: the captain tells the doctor to let the mom die if only one of the mom or the child can be saved.
Ofelia lets the faun use her as a tool throughout most of the movie, because she wants to escape into fantasy. This also distressed me: what about her mom? What about Mercedes? It's axiomatic that before escaping you should consider your fellow prisoners.
Finally she faces down the faun, because she does not trust it with the baby and the big knife she got for it. She says she would rather be a mortal and die than let it harm her brother. It's an excellent touch when the captain shoots her seconds later: I appreciate the purity of pushing past the "sure I'll be mortal but that doesn't mean now" dodge. Anyway, she turns away from the fantasy escape and faces the real world where people have been dying horribly all movie long, and dies horribly. Tears Mercedes up.
So what's the point? Living in a fantasy in dire times will fuck over the people who care about you? I guess that's maybe worth seeing the movie for.
But then there's the last bit of the fantasy, where she's in the court of her father the fantasy king and all is well. There the faun is, skulking around the base of the pillarthrones with its goatish legs, just a servant of the king sent to test her... And there we are in Christian allegory. Goddamnit, I do not buy that everything the faun and the captain did was for the best. What kind of crappy-ass father sets up his daughter to fail at the "don't eat anything" task so she can be chased by a baby-eater and yelled at and cursed, so that the stakes for the important choice are even higher? Grah. Anyway, she arguably goes to Heaven, but I wouldn't call it a win.
Ofelia becomes a ruler because she is born to be one. As the captain says at the dinner party, there's just a better class of people the rest should follow. Of the fantasy people Ofelia commands, she lets two of three get eaten, and then never apologizes, calling it a mistake that she didn't think anyone would notice. Much like the captain mistakenly murdered two peasants at the beginning of the film.
So, perhaps, only those who engage with the real world can see clearly enough to avoid becoming the monsters they're surrounded by?
Anyway. I'm not exactly sad I spent a couple hours on "El Laberinto del fauno" because it's a mysteryshop full of neat things to build essays around, but I'm glad it didn't pick up the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
I wouldn't recommend seeing it; it was very black and very sad, and to my view, it didn't offer enough to offset that. There are many different takes on it, though; here are a few I've looked at since coming home. Below the spoiler-filled cut, I'll offer mine.
So, the faun was clearly bad. The entire fantasy was bad... Of course, the whole movie was black, lighting-wise and otherwise. But the fantasy: in the first three minutes Ofelia finds the eye of a statue and puts it back in. Already the creepy-factor in the lighting and soundtrack was was cranked, so I wasn't too sanguine about this. Someone had clearly taken a great deal of effort to carve the eye of that statue out... It's stone, fercryingoutloud. Reminiscent of Odin, who's a bad guy to deal with. I comforted myself that the eye part was only about 20 feet away, and if it was really a problem for the statue to see out properly, the carver would have taken the eyestone much father away. Anyway, the result is that from the gaping mouth of the statue bursts a ghastly bug bigger than her face: not usually a good sign. Ofelia does a good turn for a thing by the side of the road, and gets a hideous startling bug? Bad sign.
And the hideous bug is the best part of her fantasy for all but the last three minutes. Everything else is worse.
But back to the faun. It's the captain, her stepfather. I noted the first time the captain came on screen, ~Man, what is up with the sound mixing of this movie?!~ Creaking leather like a leather ship in a storm, loud as dialog. First time the faun came on screen: creaks like leather. Where would it be secreting leather about itself, eh? Beyond the soundtrack cues: it yells at her. It holds her chin in its fingers. It wants her to obey it without question or deviation. It sends her to wallow in the muck versus the captain wanting her to wallow in social milieu of his evil dinner guests. (It has a face like something out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though that's a bit besides the point...)
The faun offers her mandrake. I'm like ~Aa! No! It's definitely evil!~ I'm pretty sure that mandrake isn't one of those "dick around with it to make things nice" kinds of components. Not an herbalist, but I'm pretty sure mandrake is a poison and used to make horrible things... Figured the faun was using Ofelia to kill her mother. Mandrake goes into action: the captain tells the doctor to let the mom die if only one of the mom or the child can be saved.
Ofelia lets the faun use her as a tool throughout most of the movie, because she wants to escape into fantasy. This also distressed me: what about her mom? What about Mercedes? It's axiomatic that before escaping you should consider your fellow prisoners.
Finally she faces down the faun, because she does not trust it with the baby and the big knife she got for it. She says she would rather be a mortal and die than let it harm her brother. It's an excellent touch when the captain shoots her seconds later: I appreciate the purity of pushing past the "sure I'll be mortal but that doesn't mean now" dodge. Anyway, she turns away from the fantasy escape and faces the real world where people have been dying horribly all movie long, and dies horribly. Tears Mercedes up.
So what's the point? Living in a fantasy in dire times will fuck over the people who care about you? I guess that's maybe worth seeing the movie for.
But then there's the last bit of the fantasy, where she's in the court of her father the fantasy king and all is well. There the faun is, skulking around the base of the pillarthrones with its goatish legs, just a servant of the king sent to test her... And there we are in Christian allegory. Goddamnit, I do not buy that everything the faun and the captain did was for the best. What kind of crappy-ass father sets up his daughter to fail at the "don't eat anything" task so she can be chased by a baby-eater and yelled at and cursed, so that the stakes for the important choice are even higher? Grah. Anyway, she arguably goes to Heaven, but I wouldn't call it a win.
Ofelia becomes a ruler because she is born to be one. As the captain says at the dinner party, there's just a better class of people the rest should follow. Of the fantasy people Ofelia commands, she lets two of three get eaten, and then never apologizes, calling it a mistake that she didn't think anyone would notice. Much like the captain mistakenly murdered two peasants at the beginning of the film.
So, perhaps, only those who engage with the real world can see clearly enough to avoid becoming the monsters they're surrounded by?
Anyway. I'm not exactly sad I spent a couple hours on "El Laberinto del fauno" because it's a mysteryshop full of neat things to build essays around, but I'm glad it didn't pick up the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-03 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-03 11:53 pm (UTC)I like your connecting the faun to the captain in your description.
My understanding about the English name is that the director chose to have a consistent translation for other languages, and while not all languages have a word for "faun," they apparently all have "Pan" as a legal word. I think that's lame, 'cause English has "faun," but that's me. But yeah, Pan != a faun, even though they look similar, and so the English title sets up all sorts of incorrect expectations.
One of my favorite parts of the film was its exploration of the philosophy of fascism and the resistance thereto. I loved the doctor character. (And seeing it on a date with an ER doctor was an interesting experience, lemme tell ya....)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-04 11:43 pm (UTC)Obviously, her fantasies were dark. And the faun was clearly the mirror image of her fascist stepfather, and was drawing her into evil. (I saw the mandrake root as potentially dangerous but not poisonous. Within folklore, it is said to aid female fertility, but if it is taken out of the ground in the wrong way, it screams and all those who hear its scream die.)
To me the point of the movie was that mixing of fantasy and reality. The lure of being the elite, and of helping her mother, drew Ofelia to almost want to work with what was obviously dark and evil. The fascists were the blatant evil, but the fantasy let her almost think that the dark stuff was somehow OK. I didn't think the message of the film is against fantasy, but it is cautionary that it can lead one into evil. Ofelia almost came to hating her evil stepfather so much that she would kill her baby half-brother in revenge. She resisted in the end, but I feel that she would have done better to not kidnap him at all but instead run away.