Film Review of El laberinto del fauno

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作業複製。。。

Setting the background at Franco's regime after Spanish civil war, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a unique dark fairy tale that metaphors the status quo of Spanish society itself. Brutal but beautiful, magical but earthy, this film create two parallel worlds that cruising between, which mutually promote to the zenith of the emotion--a primal thrill and horror.

Although you will know it is a fairy tale at first sight, its R rating indicated, this movie is more for adult than children. It is Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups because of massive violent scenes. Through the imaginary world of a little girl, where inhabited nightmarish creatures, Pan's labyrinth made the fear of the war at the hand and visible.

Pan's labyrinth successfully featured a girl named Ofelia, who is travelling with her mother to live with her stepfather, a brutal Nationalist captain Vidal. Although he is Ofelia's stepfather, Vidal only cares about the unborn child his wife is carrying, which is a son who will carry on his lineage. Feel the brutality and horror of reality when arrives there, little Ofelia increasingly takes refuge from her imagined fantasy world instead of the real life. Ofelia meets a faun who gives her three dangerous tasks and tells her that if she accomplishes them, she will become the princess that she once possessed in the underworld. She strives in the two different world, where both have dangerous, both have monsters. She is too weak to change reality, but she can only change the fantasy.

The director certainly is not advocating escapism, but showing the civilian's helplessness in the war. This anti-war ideology along with anti-fascism runs thorough the whole film. The death of innocent hunters, smashed rabbits, the partisan's last look at his bad-leg, many detailed scenes show the inhumanity of fascism and brutality of the war. The bitter but content, tragic but healing ending put it into the upsurge, which subverts the happy ending tradition of fairy tale, as well, it suggests that there is no real escape from reality.

In Pan's labyrinth, the world of Ofelia's imagination and the reality of Franco's Spain are ideologically opposite, but it tells the same story--a story of resistant tyranny and the timeless struggle between good and evil. The two threads are isolated from each other in the form, but the purport meet and unified harmoniously.