El laberinto del fauno (2006)

English title: Pan's Labyrinth.

Synopsis: After the end of the Civil War in Spain there are still some isolated guerrilla groups that resist the fascists. This is the story of a 12 year old girl whose widowed mother has remarried to a fascist captain and now expects his child. The girl and the mother move to the house where the captain is staying and from where he is leading the counter-resistance against the rebels in the hills. In that environment the girl will come into contact with supernatural beings.

Appraisal (spoilers herein): This film has some points of contact with my previous viewing, The Little Match Seller. Both envision a poetic martyrization of childhood, and have very similar elements in their endings. This is a notion of disputable healthfulness in itself, usually derived from the authors' own childhood of vicissitudes and often associated with a strongly Christian upbringing. However, in 'El laberinto del fauno', the undertones are much more decidedly disturbing. The suffering in the movie is not caused by natural or economic odds, as in Andersen's tale, but by (1) the actions of a human character that is made to behave like an evil machine; and (2) sets of rules dictated by supernatural characters only one character can see. In short, it's the writer/director himself that is arbitrarily making his characters - one of whom a child of 12 - suffer and die, not some historical context that has been abstracted and exaggerated to the level of a cartoon. Apparently, there is a radical feminist agenda in the film, and nearly all the important female characters are systematically victimized. Even the rebels are found guilty: at one point, the doctor, who takes a fancy towards the governess, asks her brother, a rebel, why he insists on fighting a lost war when it is so imposing upon his sister. So, both sides are ultimately 'the oppressor', and the real victims are the women. The captain's obsession with his unborn child's gender ('It will be a boy', he decrees) is another manifestation of the sexism that the film denounces. The film's 'real' and 'imaginary' parts don't match well; also, the twist by which the faun's despotism is made to be a 'test' on the child's character is preposterous; a child's suffering is not 'better' because it comes from a supernatural agent (although most Christian people would probably disagree). Quite shortly put, a big mess of a movie, that is simplistic in its ideology and unpleasant to watch except for the well-designed monsters and related creatures.

Rating: 23