Ryan ChartrandCuentos Irreales, as they are called in Spanish, are fairy tales as we’ve known them growing up. However, “Pan’s Labyrinth” shows viewers how different a fairy tale can be from a foreign perspective. The award-winning Spanish filmmaker Guillermo del Toro harnessed the beauty of child innocence through the cathartic idea of fairy tales in an unforgiving dark reality.
Ofelia, the main character played by Ivana Baquero, is a young girl living in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. In the year 1944, Ofelia and her mother (Ariadna Gil) travel to live with her new father, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), in the countryside that has been turned into an army base.
The themes are ones we have seen before; the mother is pregnant with the captain’s son. She doesn’t love the inevitably cruel man that she remarried and, likewise, all the captain wants is an heir. And then there’s Ofelia, trapped in between the love of her mother and fear of her stepfather.
While this doesn’t sound like the typical Cinderella story, the magic happens when Ofelia finds her escape – a labyrinth.
This young girl travels through a mysterious, new world unafraid, even after she encounters a gigantic toad and a zombie with eyes in its hands; it’s reality’s monsters that cause her the biggest fright.
It’s characters like her stepfather and his posse who brutally, and in very gruesome acts, kill traitors and the so-called Reds that are against the dictatorship that are the most haunting.
Those of the faint of heart be wary: this is a fairy tale with more blood than glitter. The glass slipper in this case was probably used as a torture device to get intelligence out of the opposition (in Captain Vidal’s case).
Yet that’s the amazing quality of del Toro, to contrast the story of a princess lost in a mortal world with that of the same girl finding her only means of refuge in an utterly perplexing maze.
But the labyrinth doesn’t offer its solace to anyone; Ofelia is put to three tests by a monstrous faun to find a golden key, retrieve a dagger and, lastly, shed a drop of innocent blood.
The underlying theme is that too often in life people obey without questioning. And perhaps that is what makes this movie the biggest opponent to the control that Franco had over an entire nation for over four decades.
Without giving away the end of this chilling and enjoyable film, it’s Ofelia that ends up the heroine, for going against the current and, thus, receiving an award that cures her suffering for eternity.
However dark and disturbing the film was, the audience can’t help but like the overwhelming truth behind this gothic fairytale.
This story isn’t so glamorous, isn’t so “happily ever after”; and isn’t what Americans see as the typical didactic tale that lift their hearts.
Yet “Pan’s Labyrinth” throws fantasy into the real world, and in the mix we find strength in Ofelia’s tragedy and hope in her imagination. And that in the end, we can only hope to be like her, that the labyrinth will not make us lost, but help us find our way.
