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PAN'S LABYRINTH
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The key scene in Pan's Labyrinth happens in its first ten seconds. A young girl lies on her back unconscious, her face toward the camera, black viscous blood seeping slowly up her gray-white cheek into her nostrils.
In the blink of an eye we whisk to 1944: a verdant green and dappled forest as a convoy of running-board gray military Benzes flying Spanish eagle flags rushes with leaf-scattering speed up a winding brown-earth road to a cleared Pyrenees wooden encampment, delivering very pregnant Carmen to her second husband, Nationalist Captain Vidal. His small company has been billeted here to eradicate the two score beret-topped burp-gun-toting partisans that have bedeviled the government for six years after the Spanish Civil War officially ended. How they have survived is never explained, nor is any of the simplistic and implausible back story, but we are given to understand, through crude blunt brushstrokes of violence, that Capitan Vidal is a ruthless butcher, his wife a fragile widow now remarried, her baby their unborn son, and her daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) an unwanted nuisance, carefully polite but silently condemnatory.
Ofelia is entirely lonely, her anemic mother confined to bed rest, the camp manned by soldiers for whom she is no more than animate chattel, to be avoided as one might avoid a precious figurine, abstractly appealing but hell to pay if broken or even cracked. So she turns, as many a child introvert turns, to her books and fairy tales. When a walking stick insect transmutes before her eyes into a green hairless fairy, complete with expressive eyes, hands, and a chirrupy whistle, she follows enraptured into the arched crumbling stone and hedge maze, the labyrinth, in the keystone of whose entry arch presides is a black-hole-eyed, open-mouthed, mute satyr's head. In she goes, among the rotting moist fallen leaves and hanging ivy, to the central cenote, and down the stone spiral staircase. At its base she finds an incised labyrinth at whose center is a gnarled pillar … that when she turns, comes alive and greets her as the Faun.
All this is lushly staged, each exploratory corner a verdantly realized wonderland that effectively draws us in. From here the narrative proceeds as a classic zipper story, two divergent strands alternating their action yet drawing closer. The Faun gives Ofelia a quest of three tasks, all to be completed before the next full moon. Capitan Vidal sets traps for the partisans, escalating his violence as he does so. Ofelia's quest becomes ever more visibly allegorical -- a hideous toad that sucks all vitality standing in for the garrison sequestering all the food, and so on – and sequential: rocks secure key, key secures golden dagger, dagger secures … what? In her daytime hours she tries fairy magic to help her brother's impending birth, her mother's agonizing pregnancy. As Ofelia's fairyland tasks become harder, her stepfather Capitan Vidal becomes every more obsessed, ever more brutal, in pursuit of his goal.
From here events proceed in converging escalation: of emotional stakes for Ofelia and mortal stakes for Capitan Vidal, until they zip together on the full moon's night.
Though visually sumptuous, Pan's Labyrinth is psychologically and narratively simple: the good too good, the evil too vile, for anything but a gulf between them. War is presented, as it was in The English Patient, as remote random destruction, offstage explosions and rumpled wreckage. The small-arms combat is strategically dumb and tactically suicidal, and the whole real-world story is actually a mere moral allegory enacted by adults. Against that, the scenery and staging and performances are gripping, hypnotic, and Ofelia's night quests genuinely terrifying. Doug Jones's faun is both feral and arboreal, mincing and furtive, soothing and intimidating. It is a tour de force that, together with Ofelia's flickering pre-adolescent innocence, carries the film.
Like Terry Gilliam's grotesque dystopia Brazil, whose brooding gigantic look may have inspired writer/ director Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth ends well but unwell, as the screen's bold colors are bleached into black, gray, and white. There are no fairies, concludes the film, the ending is not happy, and the dead and dying do not rise again.