El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)

What an amazing film. I finally got to see this after waiting weeks and weeks for my name to move down the long wait list at the local library. My friend Willowtree has an excellent review of this film that she wrote on June 6, 2007, something I could not improve upon, so I will describe more of my feelings about the film itself. In reading the Wikipedia entry on the film, a fellow director of Labyrinth's director, Guillermo del Toro, describes the film as "very Catholic" (although del Toro himself prefers "profane" - surely in the sense of earthly, and the here and now, as opposed to the "sacred" of the otherworldly). Coming from a Catholic backround, at least nominally, I can see such a description quite plainly throughout the storyline, and most certainly in the final scenes (which look much like a Catholic Mass altar, writ large). It is a story of innocence, courage, and redemption, so it is very much within the Catholic/Christian tradition. The pre-Catholic mythical aspects of the film though, with fauns and fairies, and other mythical creatures, hearkens back to a pre-Christian Europe, when the Old Religion still held sway, and when Pan the nature deity, ruled over forests full of the spirits and forces of the natural world. One of the many deeper allegories evoked by this film is how we have long become disconnected from the natural world, and therefore cannot relate with what folklorist and scholar Mircea Eliade called the "enchantment" of the world when such beliefs, including the very embodiment of spiritual existence as being at one with the natural realm, ruled supreme. Science and modern lifestyles have done away with much of that, leaving us only an existential, bleak landscape. Films such as this though, evoke that lost enchantment, and tell us that through things such as art and creation, the hope for such worlds can still go on. As well, the word "myth", according to folklorist Joseph Campbell, describes not a story which is untrue, but in fact refers to the story of those things that have the most deepest of meanings to human beings, and therefore serve for us in reality, as the highest of truths. When Ofelia creates a doorway with chalk, or sees her future in the book of blank pages, we can see that the world of myth and enchantment can have effects in the real world, and at times can even serve as a "necessity" for survival.

Another aspect I really liked about the film was how the fascist regime of Francisco Franco's Spain was paralled against the mythical world of the little girl, Ofelia. This to me was another allegory for a real world full of much pain and suffering, juxtaposed against a mythical world where hope still perhaps might be found. Ofelia was able to retreat from the oppression surrounding her into a world so real that it was able to carry her through, to her final, if unfortunate destiny. Even here though, the film provides hope, a hope that innocence can conquer evil, one day here on earth, as with the Resistance to Franco's evil regime, as well as beyond, through the love of Ofelia for her missing father, her love being her very "essence", as described in the film when she is tested by the faun to see if she has maintained such "essence"; and with whom she, in her last dying moments, is ultimately reunited with in the most glorious of ways. There was a line in the film by the faun, who says at one point something to the effect of,"by knowing of that which is missing or absent from us, we are in that way assured of its very real and true essence." I think that this may now be my most favorite film of all time.