With El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth en English), director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) has stirred a buzz in Tinseltown close to that of his friends Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (Babel). The triumvirate of Mexican-born directors has brought a new passion to directing, a passion in which they don't sacrifice their vision for box office numbers.
Del Toro has made a film that is heart-wrenchingly hopeful yet severely disturbing all based in a most original context. His drive to inspire others through his craft and his attention to every subtle detail is only matched by few others - names like Scorsese and Kubrick come to mind - and it's no surprise "Labyrinth" received six Oscar nominations this week, including best foreign-language film and best-original screenplay.
It's an original screenplay indeed. Del Toro drops us into this world of 1940's Spain, where General Francisco Franco's army is in the middle of a torrid battle to control a fascist state over the struggling community-based socialist movement. We're soon introduced to the main character Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who is traveling with her widowed and pregnant mother to live with her new beau Vidal (Sergi López), a captain in Franco's regime of fascism.
Right off the bat, the audience is witness to the brutality of Vidal vs. the innocence and wonder held with the mind of young Ofelia. She is a young girl who would rather find hope in a book of fairytales than to be a spectator in a world filled with war and illness. Vidal on the other hand trusts no one and will stop at nothing to blindly follow the orders of his general.
These two extremes were born directly from the spirit of del Toro's direction. He's not afraid to show you a brutal reality in his films, yet the fanaticism contained within this reality is original only to him. Del Toro's distinctive flight of imagination begins to unfold through the eyes of Ofelia as she follows a fairy to explore a labyrinth on the grounds of the army encampment.
There she meets a faun (a half-man half-goat for those not in the know) who believes she is the princess returned to claim her throne, bringing peace to the dream world in which he resides. She is told she must complete three tasks to rightfully regain position.
Sure this sounds like a children's story, but the execution of that story is far from childlike. The frightening qualities of the enemies in her fantasies are just as brutal as the reality of war.
In any other movie the faun could easily pass for a monster in the closet due to his appearance and mannerisms and he's not even the baddest on the block, you'll know him when you see him. However, though the faun is downright scary Ofelia has been given a glimmer of hope for her future so she is forced to trust him.
Soon enough, things in Ofelia's reality start to go horribly wrong, as her mother becomes ill and the times between skirmishes of war grow shorter and shorter. Her fantasies and reality begin to blur together even further and the audience is crazed and daunted with deciding what is real and what is not and more importantly which world of Ofelia's is crueler.
In the end, Ofelia must ultimately face the reality imposed on her and del Toro doesn't err on the side of predictability. The audience might think they are leaving the theatre breathless from the amazing cinematography and refreshingly original world of fantasy. But they're truly feeling the Mike Tyson gut punch of bleak fantasy combined with an unreal certainty of life that del Toro delivers throughout the movie right to the bitter-and I do mean bitter-end. GRADE: A
