Little girl lost

Noel Vera

The fairy tale that opens the picture--about a princess from an
underground kingdom who wanders to the surface, can't find her way
back, grows old, and dies--pretty much says it all: this is the
story of a girl who was lost, and has since been trying to find
herself. Or rather who felt lost, then fumbled her way to some form
of self-assessment--what kind of person she is, what she will or
will not do.

It's Spain, 1944; Franco's fascist regime has been in power for some
years now. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is being driven along with her
mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) through miles of woodland to her new
stepfather, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez); Vidal welcomes his new wife-
-hugely pregnant with his precious new son--and stepdaughter,
installs them in the old mill where he's staying, and continues on
his sadistic business of hunting down and torturing the few diehard
Republicans hiding in the surrounding mountains. Ofelia, mostly left
to herself, explores the grounds of the mill, and an old labyrinth
nearby; she encounters a giant faun (Doug Jones--he had previously
acted out marine superhero Abe Sapiens in del Toro's "Hellboy") who
explains to her that she's really the long-lost princess, and to
regain access to her underground kingdom she must perform three
tasks before the coming of the full moon.

It's easy to say Guillermo del Toro's "El laberinto del fauno"
(Pan's Labyrinth, 2006) is a fantasy--or perhaps not; I've heard
reactions from hardcore fantasy freaks that the fantasy is really
rather minimal, the special effects less than spectacular. Fine by
me--I'm not one to look for spectacle, or the "Wow! Wasn't that
kewl?" factor; if anything, this is one of the rare CGI films where
the digital effects seem more convincing than conventionally flashy,
more carefully executed and integrated into the live-action footage
so that the fantastic creatures actually seem to stand before you,
with real texture and heft to them (If you reached out towards the
screen, you almost find yourself thinking, you just might brush
amphibian slime, or parchmentlike monster skin, or worse).

As for the minimal fantasy--del Toro has been quoted as saying he
sees fantasy as "not a way to escape reality but to articulate
reality…a way to talk about big truths." The film isn't really about
a girl who escapes into a fantasy world because the real world is
too unpleasant for her, but about a girl who creates a fantasy world
to help mediate what's happening in the world around her. Fantasy as
therapy, a means of coping.

You see it in the film's style--the boundary between reality and
fantasy is deliberately blurred. Ofelia climbs out of a car, peers
at an old stone sculpture with a dark hole of a mouth. The hole
suddenly burps forth an oddly winged and articulated insect--not
common-looking, but not entirely fantastic (you may have seen
something similar on a nature channel documentary--the unsettling
resemblance to several types of walking sticks is probably
intentional); the girl, convinced that what she's seeing is a fairy,
talks to it. She's called back to the car, which drives off; the
insect flits to a position behind a tree, and, with preternatural
intelligence, peers around the tree at the departing vehicle. The
entire sequence is grounded in reality (slightly stretched reality--
the insect is a well crafted CGI creation), with only the insect's
last gesture hinting at something a little more, hinting that
perhaps the girl is right.

Later you see more correlations between real and make-believe. The
adventure with the toad beneath the tree (the first of the girl's
three tasks) is some kind of parable--the toad representing the
Fascists growing fat off the roots of the starved fig tree (Spain,
or at least the people living around the Capitan's mill); the
adventure with The Pale Man (Doug Jones, again--del Toro calls the
two creatures "incarnations of the same character"). The second
adventure can be seen as a retelling of her and her housekeeper
Mercedes' (Maribel Verdu) predicament--Ofelia sneaking out on
nocturnal secret missions for a faun, Mercedes doing likewise for
the Republicans she secretly supports, in defiance of Capitan Vidal.
Both missions, it should be noted, involve a key; both carry out
their missions literally under the noses of creatures (The Pale Man;
Capitan Vidal) who are dangerous when awakened. The third task is
the most perilous of all, of course, the one where Mercedes' world
of Fascists and Republicans in mortal conflict and Ofelia's world of
underground kingdoms and perils beyond her understanding ultimately
collide.

Del Toro doesn't follow any strict rules with his fantasies, drawing
inspiration everywhere, from Dunsany to Dodgson to C.S. Lewis to
Borges, and that's all right--one can imagine the book-savvy Ofelia,
picking and choosing from what she's read, and reconstructing them
to fit her present circumstances (Lewis and Borges's influence may
be anachronistic--but never mind). He strives to give the forest
where the Republicans hide a fairy-tale look (you feel as if you
might spot Hansel and Gretel wandering among the trees), while the
Capitan's mill house resembles an ogre's den; at the same time,
Ofelia's fantasy world finds many echoes and correlations in the
real world (along with the aforementioned correspondences to real
life, del Toro notes that the Pale Man's dining room is laid out
almost exactly like the Capitan's).

Sergi Lopez's Capitan is such a strong presence some critics have
wondered could the film have been better--or more complex--if he had
been recast as a more sympathetic figure, adding a note of ambiguity
(as for those who would question its authenticity--whether or not
such violence was practiced--I would them to records of
interrogation methods used at the time, methods used and still used
in the Philippines, actually). I'd argue that creating a sympathetic
Capitan would either extend the film's running length or take screen
time away from Ofelia--and Ofelia, not the Capitan, is the films'
true focus (or what del Toro chose to be the true focus). The film
is not so much about choice, or at least not directly, as it is
about learning to use imagination, the power of conceptualization.
Imagination has helped her survive, keep her sanity, process
information otherwise unbearable to her--the fact, for example that
her baby brother may be endangering her mother's life (a reason for
her to hate the unborn child); she could blame it on the Capitan
instead, for taking away the mandrake root she had hidden under her
mother's bed (when you think about it, it IS the Capitan's fault--he
insisted on having the woman driven over, despite her fragile
health). Imagination has served her well throughout the film;
towards the end, its machinations hone her attention, make her
realize what's really at stake, what she must do in the midst of
chaos, and who she must defy to do it. She learns an even more
important lesson, the limits imagination must inevitably have: at
what point she should stop listening to the voices in her head--the
voices she created and yearns to yield to and obey--and start
listening to an even fainter voice, that of her still developing
moral sense. The film has for its center a labyrinth, the labyrinth
for its center a little girl, the girl for her center a complex knot
of feelings (jealousy of her unborn brother; fear of her stepfather
and of the giant faun; unrequited love for her distracted mother and
developing love for the secretly heroic housekeeper, Mercedes), the
knot for its center a bewildered consciousness, trying to untangle
it all and escape.

Not perhaps a great--I can't help but compare it to Victor
Erice's "El espiritu de la colmena" (Spirit of the beehive, 1973), a
clear influence and far more beautiful, delicate, mysterious film--
but at least the best fantasy film I've seen in recent years.

(First published in Businessworld, 4/27/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)