Pan

Jeff and I saw the superb Pan’s Labyrinth just over a week ago, and I’ve patiently waited him out, thinking: he’ll put up a good post about it, and I can virtually nod my head. But he’s remiss. So I’ll note quickly a couple things:

I loved the film’s negotiation of the “fantasy” and the “reality”–or, rather, I loved that it both invites our attention to the distinction between its represented worlds and also carefully decenters our certainties about both. One world depicts a young girl grappling with a beyond-evil stepfather, a Captain in the fascist Spanish military brutally quashing the local resistance (even as he sternly seeks control of his new wife’s pregnancy). But the girl frequently wanders off into an old maze on the edge of the property, where she encounters a faun who recognizes her as a long-lost princess, and sets her three tasks allow her return to her rightful royal heritage in the underworld. The film pitches back and forth between the fantasy quest and the quasi-realistic homelife, but throughout maintains a dream-like intensity that undermines the distinctions. My own reading of the film (and this is not a spoiler) is that a fairy-tale sensibility limns each plot; rather than the real and the fantastic, the narratives intersect in their depictions of archetypal characters, their lush imagery, the uncanny intrusion of unconscious fears and desires into every aspect of the girl’s life (or lives).

Its got some stunning scenes, and I’d single out (as I have elsewhere) the fantastic Sergi Lopez, who even in the one-note evil stepfather role manages to orchestrate a distilled clarity and complexity to his character’s machinations and meanness. It’s a sad, sometimes frightening, always lovely film.

7 thoughts on “Pan

  1. I very much enjoyed this film but I did find the fascist step-father way over the top. Reynolds makes a great argument to incorporate this hyper-intense distillation of evil into the film’s larger, beautifully surrealistic negotiation of the fantastic and the real; but I still believe Lopez’s charaacter to be too, too much. He’s superhuman, hyper-masculine, overtly misogynistic, pure, pure evil. I never really knew how to fit him into the universe Del Toro constructs (I mean I got it but it felt like overkill; a bit more subtlety and a little more humanity would have made the dramatic tensions between the world of the faun and the world of Franco more challenging for me as an audience member). There are other “real-world” characters who are highly charged but also believable without undermining our uncertainties about the “world” we think we know and the “world” that lies beyond. A friend who also attended the screening brought up Hayao Miyazaki to counter Reynold’s initial reading, and I feel as if the films coming out of Studio Ghibli are much better at navigating these boarderlands than Pan’s Labyrinth. There is something immanently believable about Miyazaki’s grand designs that makes me work harder to unpack the signs and dramatic actions. That being said, this is a stunningly beautifull film: dark, dangerous, and Romantically sublime. I guess I just wanted a little bit more mystery in both worlds.

    I’m going to add another thought. Lopez’s work is reminiscient of Dennis Hopper’s Frank in Blue Velvet (a film that is offering some wonderful inspiration for a theatre project I’m currently directing). While Frank is also evil incarnate, there’s something vulnerable about him; something mysterious and fluid and dangerously alluring and repulsive. I didn’t get that (yet it appears that Reynolds did) with Lopez’s work in Labyrinth.

  2. I’m directing a play by Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes (Fefu and Her Friends) and Blue Velvet is the closest I can get to communicating to my design team the tensions between the shiny happy surfaces at play in both Fornes’ play and Lynch’s film and the dark, abject underbelly that articulates or enacts what lurks beneath such questionable surfaces. I’m also finding much inspiration from tenth century playwright/nun Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, whose The Conversion of Thais the Whore offers some useful inspiration to the work I’m trying to accomplish. I haven’t cast the show yet but as soon as I do I look foward to seeing how the eight women in the play respond to both Hrosvitha’s play, Lynch’s film, Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection and Elizabeth Grosz’s work on transgressive bodies. Let’s hope these brave gals are willing to follow me into the unknown.

  3. Speaking of adapting Lynch’s vision, I saw the opera of ‘Lost Highway’ last night. It was bizarre in almost every way, and too overwrought for my taste, but it did effectively convey a sense of overwhelming dislocation and disorientation. Impressive use of light, sound and video.

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