Even attached to lucrative American nixers (Mimic, Hellboy, Blade 2), Guillermo Del Toro has always managed to impress uniquely fabulist fingerprints onto his material. Those films alone, would, in the crass meritocracy of filmmaking, justify a gigantic novelty sized blank cheque, but left to his own devices he’s something else again; a rocking-good talent capable of approximating what Borges or Marquez fashioned with language. That’s all the more impressive when one considers that the very dogs on the street could, if asked, stroke their chins and tell you that magic-realism and cinema are queasy bedfellows. Only a few have dared (Spider’s Strategem) and prospered. Everybody else has swan dived into messy festering sewage with the attempt.
This week, then, we have cause to say woo-hoo. Fantastic, sadistic and sublime, Pan’s Labyrinth, the director’s latest work is a coruscating fairy-tale breeding horror, politics and unblemished innocence to produce the hands-down, honest-to-God, best movie of 2006. Locating a terrifying nexus between a young girl’s escapism and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the film recreates The Gold Bearded Man folktale as a splendid original. Our pretty juvenile protagonist Ofelia (Baquero) is, like many archetypal heroines before, on the verge of puberty. Equally fearful of her monstrous stepfather (Lopez), the vicious embers of guerrilla warfare and womanhood she retreats down her own imaginative rabbit hole.
Her proclivity for childish things prompts a retreat from a conflicted household into the ruins of an ancient labyrinth. There, she meets a hoofed creature, “an old faun” (Jones), who greets her as the lost princess of the underworld. To return ‘home’, however, she must complete three challenges to prove that she is not entirely lost to the mortal world.
Echoing the horrors of Goya’s ‘Saturn Eats His Children’ and medieval images of St. Lucia with her plate of eyeballs, the set tasks are disturbing, yet infinitely preferable to family life. Sergi Lopez, essaying the most wicked screen villain since Michael Gambon chopped off testicles in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, is a fascist in every possible sense. When not demanding that his spouse be sacrificed in order to save his unborn child (he naturally insists this heir is male), he can be found torturing enemies or pounding suspects with wine bottles in the name of Franco.
Sr. Del Toro’s characteristic flair for the macabre produces unsettling spectacle – heads are ripped from bodies, instruments of torture are lovingly stroked before application and kitchen knives creatively alter facial features. The arresting use of gristle however, is eclipsed by the sad, poignant fable beneath. Little Miss Baquero’s performance is singularly affecting, particularly when one considers that she’s often cowering before special effects not added until post-production.
The spirit of the beehive lives.