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amazed by the real
Thursday, 24 May 2007 06:15 pmThis time last week I was ambling over to Mike's for dinner and a watching of Pan's Labyrinth, the DVD of which he'd just acquired. It's taken me this long to work up to blogging a response, because frankly the film stunned me - as in, offered repeated blows and/or strange drugs until my brain simply stopped working properly. It's only at a week's distance that I can start to wrap my mind around it in any intellectual sense.
What an incredible, beautiful, brutal piece of cinema, its effect so surgically visceral that even I, usually a watering-can equipped with multiple buttons for handy pushing by cheesy cinematic effects, was too shocked and shaken to cry. In many ways it represents precisely the kind of film I hate and never watch if I can help it - a horribly realistic and political exploration of a society at war, conceptually as well as literally. I hate war stories. I hate struggling resistance fighters, brutal dictatorships and innocents caught in the middle: they depress me, not just because the world they depict is depressing, but because the conclusions they tend to want me to draw about that world are so depressingly obvious. Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, forced me both to watch and to emotionally participate by its incredibly powerful use of symbol and fantasy, those languages which speak directly to the psyche without all this unnecessary fluffing around with history. In that sense, its closest cinematic relative is probably Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, which similarly paired brutality with an imaginary magical.
Except the extraordinary strength of del Toro's film is that the fantastic, fairy-tale elements (and they are, absolutely, fairy-tale in the narrative sense - structured, patterned, repetitive, inevitable, distilled) are never quite imaginary. Their texture, the mud and slime and weathered stone as well as the uncompromising terror of their monsters, make them as compellingly real as the political context which frames them. In the context of the story, you are never sure if the fantastical elements are imagined or literal, and it doesn't matter: either way, their effect is so real that you emerge from the film feeling that the actual tragedy and cruelty of events are somehow irrelevant. This is what fantasy is meant for, this is how it should be done: not the abandonment of the real, but its intensification. Not escape, but catharsis. Not the denial of painful reality, but its transfiguration.
Flights of high-flown critical language aside, two things remain to be said. One: the translation of the title into English is wrong, dead wrong, horribly wrong. The creature is a faun, not Pan - the implications in the concept of Pan are not in the slightest appropriate to what the story does, and trying to make them match distracted me. Damned Hollywood snappy-title fetishes. Two: it's a truly odd experience trying to reconcile this film with the other del Toro offerings - Blade II? I ask you. And, much though I absolutely adored Hellboy, its functioning is so absolutely different to this movie, it's an exercise in non-Euclidian geometry to imagine them in the same directorial diagram. On the other hand, it also suggests that the man has an impressive grasp of the broadest possible sweep of fantasy - from the cheesy to the sublime. Which is just as well, as I couldn't watch this kind of thing every day of the week, my heart would simply break. Bring on your superheroes.
What an incredible, beautiful, brutal piece of cinema, its effect so surgically visceral that even I, usually a watering-can equipped with multiple buttons for handy pushing by cheesy cinematic effects, was too shocked and shaken to cry. In many ways it represents precisely the kind of film I hate and never watch if I can help it - a horribly realistic and political exploration of a society at war, conceptually as well as literally. I hate war stories. I hate struggling resistance fighters, brutal dictatorships and innocents caught in the middle: they depress me, not just because the world they depict is depressing, but because the conclusions they tend to want me to draw about that world are so depressingly obvious. Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, forced me both to watch and to emotionally participate by its incredibly powerful use of symbol and fantasy, those languages which speak directly to the psyche without all this unnecessary fluffing around with history. In that sense, its closest cinematic relative is probably Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, which similarly paired brutality with an imaginary magical.
Except the extraordinary strength of del Toro's film is that the fantastic, fairy-tale elements (and they are, absolutely, fairy-tale in the narrative sense - structured, patterned, repetitive, inevitable, distilled) are never quite imaginary. Their texture, the mud and slime and weathered stone as well as the uncompromising terror of their monsters, make them as compellingly real as the political context which frames them. In the context of the story, you are never sure if the fantastical elements are imagined or literal, and it doesn't matter: either way, their effect is so real that you emerge from the film feeling that the actual tragedy and cruelty of events are somehow irrelevant. This is what fantasy is meant for, this is how it should be done: not the abandonment of the real, but its intensification. Not escape, but catharsis. Not the denial of painful reality, but its transfiguration.
Flights of high-flown critical language aside, two things remain to be said. One: the translation of the title into English is wrong, dead wrong, horribly wrong. The creature is a faun, not Pan - the implications in the concept of Pan are not in the slightest appropriate to what the story does, and trying to make them match distracted me. Damned Hollywood snappy-title fetishes. Two: it's a truly odd experience trying to reconcile this film with the other del Toro offerings - Blade II? I ask you. And, much though I absolutely adored Hellboy, its functioning is so absolutely different to this movie, it's an exercise in non-Euclidian geometry to imagine them in the same directorial diagram. On the other hand, it also suggests that the man has an impressive grasp of the broadest possible sweep of fantasy - from the cheesy to the sublime. Which is just as well, as I couldn't watch this kind of thing every day of the week, my heart would simply break. Bring on your superheroes.
