Introduction
Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth is a touching fairy tail, which combines reality and fantasy. It is not surprising that it won many academic awards. The film has deep sense and makes us to think more and to feel more. The story is about a little girl Ofelia, who arrives with her pregnant mother to her stepfather, fascist Captain Vidal. The cruelty of this man and the passiveness of her mother make Ofelia feel uncomfortable with the reality and she hides in a world of a dream, inhabited with fairy tale creatures. A way out of this kind is common for many fragile and helpless people in difficult situations, so in the Ofelia’s story we can see the pain and desperation of many people who lived in bad times like the period of the Spanish Civil War.
Main Body
The cruel Spanish reality of the Civil War period is reflected in the discussed film with deep understanding of people’s troubles and pain. We can note the profound interest of del Toro in that period of Spanish history. But as a man of art he prefers to think about such aspects of reality as human sufferings and feelings rather than about history research data. And he depicts the reality as he sees it with accuracy and impressiveness of a genies painter.
Reality and a dream is mixed in the film, so sometimes we can hardly understand what is real and what is fantastic. For example, in a scene with a mandrake root fantasy completely penetrated reality: that root was given to Ofelia by a Faun to cure her mother, but then we suddenly see the root burned by Carmen in a real life. After this Ofelia’s mother dies in childbed and we unwittingly believe her death to be caused by the burning of that fairy mandrake root. But the most touching mixture of reality and a fairy tail we see in the end of the film. It exactly has two endings: in the real life and in the fantastic one. This equivocation creates unresolved tension and makes us to think about Ofelia’s faith long after the film ended. We try to understand whether she died in her labyrinth or did she became a Princess of the underworld.
Pan’s Labyrinth does not tell us the history of Spanish Civil War or the real story of real people. It is concentrated on “how” questions rather than on “what” ones: the inside world of a person is claimed to be more important than the violent reality; not the facts but the feelings are analyzed here. Reflecting on the film we try to imagine how would we behave in the depicted situation, how would we withstand cruelty, violence, and horrors of Civil War? And how could that little girl overcome all her troubles? When we will find the answers on all these questions, we will become more mature as a person.
The film may be indicated as one of the examples of a cubist art, because it analyzes reality from different points of view. The real life is broken here into several aspects, and both object and background planes penetrate each other, creating a unique and deep feeling. Like the most cubists, del Toro does not copy nature; he emphasizes the two-dimensionality of reality.
Conclusion
A mix of history, fantasy and horror, presented in Guillermo del Toro’s film “Pan’s Labyrinth”, is a reflection on eternal questions about what is reality and what is human soul. We find here the deep understanding of a child’s thoughts and feelings, of the cruel historical reality of Civil War, of dangers of fascist ideology. Like all good art pieces the film preaches goodness.
Works sited
Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ariadna Gil, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo, Roger Casamajor, and César Vea. Warner Bros. (Mexico), Optimum (UK), Picturehouse (USA), 2006.