El Laberinto del Fauno
Sunday, January 14, 2007
"A long time ago, in the Underground Realm, there lived a princess who dreamt of the human world..."
I caught this film today (in English, the title is
Pan's Labyrinth), it's a fantasy/thriller/drama type genre film in Spanish, and I was absoultely in awe of its interweaving storylines, the special effects like animation, the plot and intense suspenseful moments the film sometimes erupts into.
I was simply sucked into this fairytale world and couldn't tell the real from the supernatural. Well, of course it didn't help that the plot interweaved with the many fairytales we grew up with but in distorted versions. The protagonist was a girl of ten, so I became a girl of ten, looking and feeling through her eyes. I winced when the monster guarding the big feast came stomping after her and held my breath as she managed to escape through the roof without getting one of her legs pulled by it, as they do in horror films. I was worried when blood-like streaks suddenly appeared on the blank pages in her magic book,
The Book of Crossroads, signalling something ominous.
The entire film was as its title suggests: a labyrinth of stories, interwoven, story within story, fairytale within fairytale, legend within legend, and then everything gets mixed up... stories within fairytales within legends. The order of which was first within which didn't matter already, because it had become a maze, or several mazes in fact, dictated by
The Book of Crossroads. The question of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" popped up in my head. Which came first? Ofelia or the Princess Moanna? Who dreamt of who first? Perhaps they were going in circles and continue to do so eternally.
Which is real? Life or fairytales? Are fairytales a part of life or is life a part of fairytales? As Ofelia's mother tells her agitatedly: "life is not like fairytales," but she doesn't believe. Neither do we, the viewers. How can we not believe, when we've seen
Alice in Wonderland with
The Princess and the Toad with
Hansel and Gretel with
The Moon Lady and many other fairytales and various folktales meshed into a few stories interwoven into one film?
The Book of Crossroads is wrong about something. It does not show Ofelia's future. It shows her the various paths she can take, but it doesn't decide what she does eventually. And ultimately, Ofelia gives up the book for the Faun's instructions but even so, she decides not to spill her brother's innocent blood in order to regain her title as Princess. She loses her fairytale status in a human act and yet she doesn't, because kindness and goodness exist especially at the fairytale level, therefore she forsakes her mortal anguished body for an eternal happy-ever-after soul in her fairy realm.
At the end, she gains her rightful place as Princess of the underground realm, yet the humans mourn for the loss of her mortal body in a highly intense emotional moment. Why I feel sad by the loss of her mortal life is something I myself cannot understand. Why does the knowledge that she has become Princess of her own world not soothe or completely comfort me in the loss of her mortal life? The end has such a mixed feeling that I end up mourning for her suffering human life instead of rejoicing for her eternal kind soul.
8:21 pm
クロサギ
