Pan's Labyrinth (SPOILERS)

Cafe Society
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That’s nice, but the movie wasn’t made by a Spaniard, it was made by a Mexican well known for his use of religious imagery and symbolism, who has made at least two movies containing obvious devil imagery in non-devil characters (*Hellboy *and El Espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) before this.

Spoilered details on my ultimate conclusions as to the faun’s nature:

[spoiler]Assuming it’s “real” (whatever that means), of course he’s not the devil. His overbearing manner, his anger and his insistence that Ofelia believe in him, obey him and essentially pledge herself to him seemed Faustian at the time, and planted a seed of doubt that was very interesting and I think what Dinsdale’s wife was referring to.

In the end, of course, he’s a nice Mr. Tumnus. He was a guide and a sweetie. But it was pretty intentionally ambiguous during the second reel there, and it did make me wonder if he was after the artifacts for his own nefarious purposes and making the story up to get Ofelia to do his bidding.[/spoiler]

62

We saw it last week. My boyfriend thought it was one of the saddest movies he’d ever seen, but one of the best films of the year and definitely in his top ten of all time. Something we both noticed was how much attention was paid to sound. Every creak of the faun’s body when he moved reminded us of trees scraping together. I also loved how the faun became younger as Ofelia completed more of her quest, and at the end was how I imagine he was before.
On a side note, I guess this somehow passed me by, but Doug Jones, who played the faun, the Pale Man (with the eyes in his hands), and Abe Sapien of Hellboy, was also the lead Gentleman in Buffy’s “Hush.”

63

I’m surprised no one mentioned this - el Capitan chasing Ofelia through the labyrinth reminded me of the ending of The Shining, when Jack is running after Danny.

And on that note…with the question of what’s real and what isn’t, what do you make of

the walls of the labyrinth moving and creating an opening for Ofelia to get to the staircase?

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[nitpick]That would be Edward Norton, an Academy Award nominee for the role, not John Cusack, though wow, it would be interesting to see Cusack play such a character. I don’t think he’s ever played anyone so hateful.[/nitpick]

65

Just saw it. Great movie! Excellent acting all around, and the violence, while very startling, did add to the story. I’m going with the theory that:

[spoiler]The magical world was Ofilia’s way of dealing with all the tragedy and violence around her. The way the magical world mimicked the real world was very telling. The whole thing starts when she kicks over a rock and imagines that it has some carvings on it. You’ll note that in the end we see her reunited with her mother and father, but that happens before she’s dead.

A side note: in the frist hour of the movie, I thought maybe there was a time trick going on and that the nurse and Ofilia were the same person. There was a lot of parallels between the two of them. The key, the brother, the not wanting to be in Vidal’s house, the shared knowledge that the nurse was helping the rebels.[/spoiler]
Anyway, I highly recommend it. El Fauno was terrific. Great CGI, and an interesting background (Spanish Civil War) that gets very little play in movies here.

I assume one of the reasons the producers went with Pan’s… instead of The Faun’s… is the homophone in English with The Fawn.

66

I finally got to see this earlier tonight after months and months of quivering anticipation.

The buzz is no exaggeration. It’s as close to a perfect film as I’ve seen in a long time. Stunning, stunning work, both transcendant and transgressive, thoughtful and deeply felt. Del Toro is in absolute top form, fully in control of his material, with total command of breathtaking layers of symbol and theme. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty much a masterpiece, a film that will reward careful attention, and as such I expect to regularly revisit the piece in the coming years. Simply brilliant.

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And you think he would have called him “el fauno” when he meant “el diablo” why? To avoid spoilering?

Again, every interview I’ve seen (and they’ve been all over spanish TV for the last year) spoke of el fauno and of old spanish legends. I wouldn’t expect a basajaun in a movie set in Colombia even if the director had been born under the shadow of Dos Hermanas… the movie is set in Spain and the imaginery is Spanish, not Mexican.

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I forgot to answer this part last night.

I think Swallowed My Cellphone’s (ouch!) fine posts and your wife and daughter’s reactions speak well enough to answer the question. In any case, we will be able to find out. At some point in the future, the local TV station will show Pan’s Labyrinth as part of their Saturday Night Lineup (maybe late night, if they can’t get a dubbed copy), and they’ll excise out every bit of shocking violence and do their best to make it as bland as possible. We’ll be able to judge then. Until then, we have the integrity of the movie theater experience to judge by, and my personal judgement is that the violence shown was absolutely necessary. Just as the violence shown in Apocalypto was absolutely necessary.

Anyone else have to stifle a shouted “NOOOOO!!” when Ofelia started to eat the food? It was one of many times when I thought I was going to faint.

Trivia that maybe most people knew but I didn’t: The woman who played Mercedes, Maribel Verdú, was Luisa in Y tu mamá también. I knew she looked familiar but I couldn’t place her. It’s been way too long since I’ve seen that movie. Y tu mamá también was directed by Guillermo del Toro’s good friend and Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuarón. What a great year they and their other director friend, Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), is having! Hooray for the 3 brilliant Mexican directors!

Cervaise, I’m so glad you liked it!

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Regarding fairy tales with rules. From the stories I read as a child, the ‘hero’ would usually always eat the food or open the door they weren’t supposed to.
What I don’t understand though is -

Ofilia has a time limit in the monsters lair. When the hourglass empties and her dooway back to the real world has closed I wondered how she was going to get out. In the end all she had to do was just draw another door. What was the point of the hourglass?

Did the director just not think it through?

70

My daughter made an additional comment last night. She said she would have been better with the violence if it had not been subtitled because she kept wanting to cover her eyes to miss the violence, but didn’t want to miss the dialogue! So she kept doing one of those things where you kinda cover part of your eyes and peek between the fingers… :smiley:

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That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, a common example of the kind of creative thinking that sets the hero apart from others. Someone who just sat down and moaned “oh no the door has closed” would never have been able to get out.

If you’re able to do that kind of creative thinking, it’s an obvious solution. If you’re not, it’s not.

Most fairy tales reward creativity and thoughtfulness, punish brute force and rashness.

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I agree with the poster who said the girl was imagining a fairy tale rendering of events that were happening in the real world. I can think of a parallel for all except -

The dying tree with the odious toad eating all the cockroaches. I can’t remember what was happening in the real world at this point, so what was that mirroring? The unborn child causing harm to the mother?

Great film.

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Yes. I was squirming in my seat, with my fingers half over my eyes. I knew it was going to happen, and it terrified me. Like Dinsdale’s daughter, I watched a lot of the movie through fingers. :smiley:

About the toad- I guess it could be a metaphor for her brother, but Ofelia seemed to be fond of the baby- she had a history of telling him beautiful stories, and seemed to talk to him quite tenderly.
What do you think the Pale Man was a metaphor for?

74

The test had a trick to it, just like the final one did.

As for your other question about the parallel

I saw it as similar to Mercedes getting the key from Vidal. Vidal = toad. But, it could just be a metaphore for the whole regime that he represented. The toad (the regime) has killed the tree (the counry and its people).

I, too, want to see this film again. I’m sure there are many things you’ll notice the second time around and I think the symbolism probably works on many levels.

75

Maybe I’m dumb. What was the second trick?

Did anyone else think the Captain silenced his wife partly because of social embarrassment? The other diners all looked fairly posh, and his wife was a tailor’s widow. Also, why was someone of his apparent social stature forced to marry down in that way?

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The fact that should could escape by drawing another door, so the time limit was bogus.

As for the dinner:

I thought that was the main reason he silenced her. The other diners were looking down their noses at her.

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Well, I accidentally started a new thread on this topic without being aware this one existed.

Equipoise summed it up well for me:

First, kudos to the film for all the “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” references, from the “white rabbit” (the giant bug) to the “rabbit hole” to the little aproned dress she wore in the beginning of the film.

I had some serious anxiety issued triggered by that film. I didn’t sleep at all last night. There was something especially sinister about it because even when I saw “Children of Men” which was quite bleak, the horror just didn’t stick with me as much as with this film. I expected all the horror of Pan’s Labyrinth to be done in a fantasy context, but it was mostly done in reality.

Those who have suggested an Ofelia/Mercedes parallel, I definitely feel that.

The way Mercedes wept for Ofelia at the end really led me to surmise that Ofelia could have been a symbol for Mercedes’ lost innocence. I don’t think it has to be either one way or the other… they could have both existed at the same time and been reflections of one another… it’s not like the world they inhabited was inflexible at all.

I can’t find the exact question asked earlier, but someone wanted to know

the symbolism of the toad. This might be WAY out of left field, but I thought that scene could be interpreted as her experiencing some form of sexual violence. The fact that she had to take her clothes off before she entered, the way she had to endure the toad’s big slimy tongue all over her and the final ejaculatory spitting up of all that disgusting gunk inside him were just really disturbing. After she emerged, her clothes were completely ruined, and something about the way she looked after she emerged from the tree trunk seemed totally disproportionate to the event that had transpired within. If not intended as overtly sexual it could have just been a reference to general loss of innocence. I just couldn’t walk away from that scene without feeling something terribly traumatic had taken place.

If the violence had been less explicit, I definitely would have enjoyed the film more… but it might not have reached as many people or had the same power. I had to leave the theater twice. I’m REALLY weak about torture scenes, and really stubborn about staying weak about them. I refuse to be desensitized to seeing another human being suffering like that. I could force myself to watch until it meant nothing, but I would lose something about myself that I value in the process. In this sense, I resented not being able to view the film in its entirety.

Not to mention I was plagued with nightmares last night and couldn’t sleep.

As I asked in the other thread, can anyone tell me how the film has been received in Spain? I had a Spanish class on this very epoch in Spain, as well as a Spanish class on the democratic transition in 1975. In order to create as little conflict as possible, Spain’s new democratic government pretty much took a “never look back” tactic that avoided holding anyone responsible for the Franco dictatorship. As far as I understood from my (native-to-Spain) Spanish teacher, Spain still bears the symbols of the Franco dictatorship, from the monument Franco built for himself in *El Valle de los Caidos *(The Valley of the Fallen) to the Franco symbol on every stoplight to even the Spanish flag. This has been challenged more recently (especially by the 70-year anniversary in 2006 of the Spanish Civil War) and I am really curious whether the movie has sparked any dialog about the tragic events of the Spanish Civil War or willingness to talk about them more openly.

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I finally saw Pan’s Labyrinth last night. It’s a wonderful film that lives up to the hype, and it’s definitely quite violent as well.

If you are hesitant to see it because of the violence (as I was), I recommend you brace yourself and see it anyway. There are a few nightmare-inducing images that will likely haunt you after the ending credits, but the film offers many beautiful moments that will stay with you much longer, and you’ll likely be very glad you gave it a chance.

Was the violence gratuitous? Mostly not. There’s a scene or two that I might have cut a few seconds short had it been up to me, but for the most part I didn’t feel like the director was being exploitive. The movie is basically about using fantasy to make sense of a of world full of random brutality and pointless suffering, and I agree with those who say the movie would not have achieved the same level of emotional impact and thematic balance had the more shocking elements been toned down by much.

Let’s face it: mainstream movies are becoming more graphic, and the average viewer is more desensitized to violence now than 20 or even 10 years ago. So I think Del Torro engages in a bit of standard one-upmanship in order to elicit the desired level of revulsion in his audience. Had this movie been made just a decade ago – before films like Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, or the Passion pushed mainstream violence to a whole 'nother level, perhaps something like the bottle scene (shudder) could’ve been left more to the imagination.

Before I scare any potential viewers away, I should mention that the violence, while not trivial, is not really that bad. I don’t even think it’s the most violent film of 2006 (either the Departed or Apocalypto deserves that distinction). I think people are more likely to notice the violence in Pan’s Labyrinth because it’s unexpected in the context of a “fairy tale”. Had this been marketed as a horror film or a war drama, most people would hardly raise an eyebrow.

There are tons of symbolic layers to this film. I’m sorely tempted to see it again so I can focus more closely on details like this.

I definitely picked up on a coming-of-age/loss-of-innocence subtext throughout the fantasy aspects of the film. I agree that there was something disturbingly phallic about the toad, and the fig tree with its dark muddy passage suggested a kind of womb – Ofelia’s exit could be interpreted as a symbolic second birth – a transition that resulted in the destruction of the green dress (a symbol of innocence?). Not to mention Ofelia’s eating of forbidden fruit, and the blood imagery of her mother’s pregnancy and Ofelia’s death and “resurrection”. I think Ofelia’s age (11 or 12?) is significant as well.

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One of the things I found really interesting throughout the movie was the interplay between knowing when to follow directions and when to question. For instance, when she picks the left door instead of the middle door in the child-eater room. But then when she ignores the instruction about eating the fruit, it turns out badly for her, as two of the fairies are eaten.
At the end, when the faun tells her that the real challenge was to choose to sacrifice yourself instead of an innocent, whether that was really the challenge. It seemed to me that it was more about not blindly following when you know it’s wrong. This seems echoed in the doctor’s last stand.

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I loved it. I watch a lot of scary (read: gorefest) movies, so the violence hardly fazed me at all-- I don’t even remember the “bottle scene” everyone’s referring to. But then, this movie wasn’t marketed such that you’re prepared for any gore, really, so I can see why people were disturbed.

I do think the end was still ambiguous, though. Hell, it was ambiguous enough that my girlfriend and I left the theater debating

whether or not the fantasy stuff was real. For my part, I think it was, simply because Ofelia received physical items from the faun which other people saw. She got both the mandrake root and the chalk from him, both of which were seen and/or interacted with by the captain. I suppose people could say she found these herself and we only saw the story she was fabricating, but…

either way, I don’t think it ultimately matters for the effect of the movie. Whether or not she

experienced those tasks in her mind or in reality, she learned from them not to obey or trust anyone blindly, but to decide right and wrong for herself. And whether or not she got to live on in the fantasy world, she was still brutally murdered in the other one.