Pan's Labyrinth

While watching this strange misfire, I couldn't help thinking about the beloved children' classic, The Wizard of Oz. What if, I mused, Dorothy had seen a group of uniformed Nazis goose-stepping down the yellow brick road. Or, if the Nazis had tied the cowardly lion to a tree and tortured him with razors. Well, if those images whet your appetite, you may enjoy Pan's Labyrinth.

It's not that the filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, is untalented. A lot of technical skill went into this project, which tells of a young girl in fascist Spain near the end of the Second World War. The girl's mother, a widow, takes up with a brutal career soldier, known only as The Captain. She becomes pregnant with his child and, along with her daughter, who is just entering puberty, comes to live with him until the child is born.

The film interweaves scenes of the Captain's relentless pursuit of Communist partisans (here simply called "the reds"), which are brutally realistic, with scenes of the girl's fantasy adventures with a faun, or goat-man, who tells her she is the daughter of the King of the Underworld, and must return there after performing dangerous tasks. The girl obeys because she believes her mother would die if she did not.

If this sounds like an uplifting children's adventure, it doesn't play that way. The back-and-forth technique makes for some very clumsy transitions, and the wartime melodrama is just ugly, "bad guy/ good guy" stuff. The actress playing the young girl, obviously talented, must have been cautioned never to smile, thus conveying pathological tendencies more than the magical perspective of childhood.

It is very difficult to portray complex reality from the point of view of a child. In 81/2 and Amarcord, Fellini was able to show how a child might view political and religious conflicts that went beyond his understanding. More recently, Miyazaki has shown that the fear and confusion of a girl's sexual awakening can be expressed with subtlety and imagination in animated form. This film, while admirably ambitious, lacks their artistry.