Guillermo del Toro knows how to tell a real fairy tale! A fairy tale that isn't all princesses, princes, magical fairies and happy endings. It might have them, but the point that has been sanitized out of fairy tales over the last century or so is the fact that they were originally cautionary tales for children, handed down through generations of oral tradition to teach children what life is. And what is the one fact that children should learn as soon as possible? That life is nasty!
Laberinto del Fauno (titled Pan's Labyrinth here, though no mention is ever made to the faun in the film being Pan) is the story of Ofelia, a little girl forced to move with her pregnant mother to rural Spain to be near her stepfather, a Captain in the fascist army during the Spanish Civil War. As she experiences first hand the horrors of war and fascism, she enters an ancient maze and meets a faun who tells her she is a lost Princess of an underground kingdom and must pass three tests to claim her place there.
I will admit that I went into this film expecting a nice, children friendly movie, but del Toro pulls no punches when it comes to the war, a war he experienced as a child. It's hard sometimes to decide what was more important to the director; Ofelia's story, or whether that was just a backdrop to highlight all the more the cruelty and brutality of the war.
There are no Indiana Jones style comedy Nazis here; the fascists are truly evil and we see it. Both the violence (which is just graphic enough to prevent us from being able to ignoring it without ever being gratuitous) and the mindsets of the people involved. What is more disturbing that any of the on screen actions is the attitude of 'pull the ladder up jack, I'm alright' of those who find themselves in privileged positions. Ariadna Gil, as Ofelia's mother showcases this perfectly. She knows full well what Vidal thinks of her only as a vessel for him unborn son, and that he probably killed Ofelia's father, but she never seems to resent him. Neither does she ever seem to love him. What you get is more a kind of relief; she knows that as long as he has a use for her she and her daughter are safe. It's purely self-preservation, to know your place and survive, and that is more disturbing to me than anything else in the film.
Sometimes it's even almost as if Ofelia's quest is the subplot, as even fantastical tales of giant toads, fauns, a magical kingdom, the Pale Man (a horrific creature with it's eye in its hands) pale into insignificance when we're faced with the true life horrors that we see mankind inflict upon itself.
And that's one of the most interesting aspects of the story. Even as everything goes on around her, as the Civil War rages around her, her mothers life lies in Captain Vidal hands, what can the innocent do. Ofelia is not part of this world, she hasn't had a hand in creating it and she does not have a hand in affecting its outcome. The faun and his quests are, to her at least, far more important as they are something that she is involved in, that are about her.
On the technical side this is a beautifully crafted film. The cinematography and sets are wonderful, never once setting a difference between the real and the fantasy. Both aspects of the film seem just as important to del Toro, some directors would have favored one or the other sides of the story and that would have made the film unbalanced.
It's clearly influenced by many fairy tales, and a nice touch is, like many movie fairy tales, we never certain whether the fantasy is real. Is Ofelia really a lost princess from a magical kingdom, or are all her adventures and meetings purely from her imagination, one of the stories she tells to her unborn brother expanded to protect her from the nightmares of real life? What Guillermo del Toro has done with this film is to create a beautiful fairy tale masterpiece that harks back to the days when fairy tales were told around a fire to scare children, not read at bedtime to put them to sleep.
