Movie Talk: Pan's Labyrinth

OK. Unless it's rated G and animated, I see something like one movie a year. Maybe two. If I see three, I'm a lucky bastard. Last week or so my wife and I were lucky enough to be relieved of the children for a time (and no, it wasn't child protective services this time), and we managed to get a movie in. That movie was Pan's Labyrinth. It's set in Spain during Franco's rule, but it's early enough in Franco's dictatorship (1944) that scattered bands of Republicans (not the US kind who actually supported Franco's fascism, but the Spanish Republic kind) are still in the mountains harrassing Franco's troops.

The film is visually beautiful, but it contains several gruesome scenes that rip you out of that visual enjoyment to remind you that the story is also set in extreme violence. The main character, Ofelia, is a young girl given to reading fairytales -- a "vice" frowned upon by her new step-father, the fascist Captain. With the conflict between the fascists and the loyalists as background, Ofelia escapes into a fantasy world in which she is the long-lost daughter of some sort of underworld king (but underworld king in a good way, not in a king of the dead way) and must accomplish three tasks before she's allowed back to the kingdom.

If this film were to win an Oscar (it's up for six, including best original screenplay and best foreign language film), I'm sure the right wing spin machine would see it as yet another example of leftwing Hollywood (yeah, leftwing Hollywood...the people who brought you the blacklist) -- I can remember when the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages went into spasms over Toni Morrison being awarded the Nobel Prize way back in the day -- but I don't know...I always thought fascism was a bad thing.

Ofelia's fairytale world isn't exactly tea parties and pixiedust, though: it owes more to Grimm's fairytales than anything cheery or bright. It's my guess that Guillermo Del Toro is making the point that the violence that surrounds Ofelia in her real life leaks over to the fairytale world, but in that fantasy world she can at least maintain some control. Certainly her step-father shows little interest in her or her mother, except so far as the mother can bear him a son.

Getting out to see this film reminded me of how much I miss going to the movies (I don't share MG!'s fear of the cinema) and how many Academy Award nominated films I haven't seen this year or last (one of my students mentioned Crash today in class, and while I know the general outline of the film, I have to say it's on my evergrowing list of films I need to see rather than a film I have seen). Maybe that can be a resolution, because the netflix queue is growing with no end in sight.