I’ve just seen El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth). I’ve been waiting for it ever since I read about it in Neil Gaiman’s blog and it’s been trailed at the last few films I’ve seen. It turned out to be one of those occasions when you read something but don’t absorb the information — I’d failed to register it was in Spanish (and the peculiar form of formal, slow, Spanish that I can understand without effort) and had completely missed that it was set just after the Spanish Civil War.
It’s a brilliant, brilliant film. Tender, brutal, scary and beautiful — adult themes wrapped in a fairy tale that sugar coat the pill, but medicine it most definitely remains. I watched it in a near empty cinema, with nothing to interrupt my suspension of disbelief. The acting is superb and the combination of art direction, prosthetics and CGI is seamless — rendering a fictional world that is entirely believable and a ‘real’ world that you wish was anything but.
On a personal level it’s a film that challenges me to raise my feeble satire and thinly veiled self-counselling into something more… more fantastic. In every sense of the word.
One incident led to a slight mental detour — when the sadistic captain Vidal is mending his dismembered watch. The fifteen second rule of miserabilism kicked in and I spent some of the scene reflecting on the demise of analogue and the utter, utter uselessness of just about everybody (in matters practical). La la.
