CINÉMATHÈQUE CRITIQUE

     Let me start by asking a question: Have you ever wanted to escape your present reality? It doesn’t matter the circumstances. You could be an adolescent who wants to escape the all-pervading influences of schoolwork, peer pressure, and parental expectations, or a person going through a midlife crisis and desiring to escape the unsatisfying life they live, or in this case, a girl whose childlike innocence and belief in fairytales serves as an escape from the harsh realities of the people and the bloodshed surrounding her. Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) explores these themes through the manifestation of the aforementioned fairy tales. It is a unique exploration of escapism and an example of the contrast between childhood and war.

     The film’s protagonist, a ten-year-old girl named Ofelia, lives in a world that is surrounded by the cruel ramifications of the Spanish Civil War, which ended a couple years prior and was won by the Falangists, led by General Francisco Franco. The mill in which she and her mother are staying at is run by a brigade of Falangist soldiers searching for rebels hidden in the surrounding woods. Their leader, Captain Vidal, is the symbolic representation of the cruelty of the Francoist regime, and the antithesis of Ofelia. Whereas Ofelia still retains her sense of childhood, reading fairy tales and being relatively disobedient (such as when she heads towards the labyrinth despite being warned not to), Vidal is a fanatical sadist fully entrenched in the Falangist ideology and completely obedient in following it and its tenets. His presence, much like that of Falangism, is all-pervading, and compels everyone in the film to either obey him, fear him, or in the case of Ofelia, escape his presence. It is here where the fantastical elements of the film appear, as Ofelia is sent by the faun that resides in the labyrinth on a traditional “Hero’s Journey” to retrieve three items of importance and to return them. I find this to be incredibly clever. Most films or books throughout history have used the Hero’s Journey as the focal point; that the story revolves around this quest that the characters must undertake. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the story instead revolves around Ofelia attempting to cope with her surroundings and the people around her, and the “Journey” she undergoes serves to enhance that. She is told by everyone, both by people with good (Her mother; Mercedes the housekeeper) and bad (Vidal) intentions that she needs to learn to grow up and face reality and to stop living and acting as if her life is a fairytale. But she refuses to. This is her way of escaping reality. This is where the true tragedy of the film resides. 

     I would like to briefly discuss the similarities between this film and another film. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s directorial feature-length debut, 1962’s Ivan’s Childhood (Ива́ново де́тство), the protagonist, a twelve-year-old boy named Ivan, serves as a scout in the Soviet army during The Second World War after his family were murdered by the Nazis. Throughout the film, scenes of him bravely following his reconnaissance missions are contrasted with dreamlike sequences of him in a happier place, whether they be him riding on an apple cart with another girl, possibly a sister who was killed by the Nazis, or the two running across a sandy beach, laughing and smiling the whole way through. The parallels between reality and fantasy and the conflict between childhood and war permeate the tragic undertones conveyed in the two films. The only profound difference being that Pan’s Labyrinth takes the fantastical elements and makes them front and center. They are what define Ofelia’s character and her motivations. You could conceivably remove the dream sequences from Ivan’s Childhood and the film would still be about a child scout who, through circumstances beyond his control, is forced to endure the harsh realities of warfare that no child should go through (it would make the film considerably less impactful, though. By removing the dreamlike and imaginative aspects that bring about the joys of childhood, the thematic juxtaposition between that and the destruction of war is also removed, but still.)

     This all comes to a head in Pan Labyrinth’s final act, when Ofelia is tasked by the faun to bring her newborn brother to the labyrinth. She is caught carrying her brother away by Vidal, and she runs towards the labyrinth as Vidal gives chase. The faun then commands her to spill some of an innocent’s (her brother’s) blood into the labyrinth as her final task before she can be welcomed again as the Princess of what is essentially the underworld. She refuses, and as punishment, the faun refuses to accept her into the kingdom, and he disappears. At that moment, Vidal catches up to her, grabs the newborn, and shoots Ofelia. After this, the film seems to take a turn, and grant Ofelia, and by extension the audience, a typical fairytale happy ending, in which the wicked Vidal is slain by the rebels, and Ofelia, by refusing to spill her brother’s blood, becomes an innocent, and after she is shot, her blood is spilled into the labyrinth, resulting in her actually being accepted by the kingdom and taking her place as the Princess alongside her father the King. The film could have ended right there, as the main story was effectively over and it would have been a very satisfying and joyful ending. Ofelia succeeded in her quest, and she gets to rule over the underworld, reunited with her father, happily ever after.

     Except no. The film then immediately cuts to Ofelia, lying on the ground mortally wounded, her face contorting into a smile before succumbing to her wounds and dying where she lay. But this raises a very important question: Why did she smile? There is a very popular interpretation concerning this film that, if true, makes the film all the more tragic and further highlights the tragedy of escapism. That all of the fantastical elements; the faun, the quest, the monsters, the labyrinth, everything, was all just that: a fantasy. A fantasy created out of the constructs of Ofelia’s imagination so as to escape herself from the horrors of war and the people that partake in it. She is shown to be fully immersed in the fairy tales she is reading at the beginning of the film as a form of escapism, and then as the film progresses, and by extent, as her situation worsens, she imagines herself as the protagonist of a fairytale of her own making. Additionally, and perhaps even more tragically, several of the fantastical elements of the film also have real-life implications. Perhaps Ofelia knows that her mother is inevitably going to die from childbirth, so she pretends that keeping a mandrake healthy with milk under her bed will keep her mother healthy. Maybe she decided to escape with her brother into the wilderness, not as a task from a supernatural being, but from the purely human instinct of her trying to prevent him from spending his childhood years with a sadistic military officer. Most strikingly, I would argue, concerns the iconic monster of the Pale Man. When Ofelia comes face-to-face with the Pale Man, she notices a banquet of food on the table, with the monster at the head of the table. The Pale Man is a being who kills and eats children should they eat the food. There is a scene earlier in the film where Captain Vidal and his men eat a banquet of food at the Falangist base, with Captain Vidal sitting at the head of the table. This is then followed by a scene where Vidal’s men are handing out food ration cards to the general populace, many of which are starving. Perhaps Ofelia imagined and created the Pale Man as how she views and represents Vidal: as a gluttonous, immoral being with absolutely no regard for human life, including children like herself.

     But, regardless, the harsh reality of life, war, and the cruelty of humanity pervade, as much as fairy tales would like to say otherwise. Ofelia, just like Ivan, is killed by the hands of the forces she sought to escape from, and all of the vibrant dreams that stem from childhood, the navïete and imagination of childhood innocence and freedom are gone forever. War, inhumanity, and their destructive capabilities know no bounds, and not even children are spared from it. Sadly, the only way she was able to escape the tragic circumstances she was put in, was through death. I can’t even begin to imagine how many children in the real world throughout history and even at present, their innocence stripped away by the cruelty of war and the people that perpetuated it, dreamt, imagined, and created stories as a form of escapism, stories of a better time, stories of a fantastical world, stories about their aspiration, stories about their loved ones, only to suffer the same fate as Ofelia and Ivan. This is the true tragedy of the film, and the bittersweet nature of childhood escapism.