New York Dispatch. 12.

Even if Pan's Labyrinth were not a poignant fable, the New York Film Festival should be commended for showing it as the festival's closing film, if only for the purpose of washing out the taste of Marie Antoinette. Guillermo Del Toro's film is anything but blithe, nor is it nostalgic in the vein of another NYFF period celebration, the revival of Reds.

Del Toro hasn't only made a fable, a delicate story of fantasy within the larger landscape of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War; he's made a moral tale about childhood and innocence. Too put it mildly, that's not the easiest thing to do these days. To understate the matter, Del Toro has done it magnificently. (Pan's Labyrinth will be released a few days after Christmas.)

The story is simple enough. Ofelia, 12, is traveling with her mother and a contingent of army troops to an old mill that has been converted into a house in a forest in the north of Spain. Her mother is pregnant with the child of Ofelia's adoptive stepfather, a captain in the fascist forces. He is a man known for his cruelty, much of which we will see. We can only imagine what he was like in a war. Outside, the forest has a life of its own, as you might expect from a forest in a fable. In part of that life is a band of partisans who are still resisting the fascists who fought their way to power at the end of the 1930s, in a bloody war that was watched by the rest of the world. Yet also in the forest is an imaginary life that Ofelia creates for herself, an alternative world that she has willed into existence, having seen the sacrifices that her own mother has made to survive under the worst of circumstances. Those circumstances will get much worse before the film ends.

This is a fable, but it's a fable that is not completely given over to fantasy. The mill where the family has taken refuge (or which has been occupied by the soldiers) is real enough to be terrifying. Think of the castle of a villain whose fist you can feel. So is the captain's brutal tactile control over Ofelia and her mother, Carmen. The fantasy world of the forest is just as tactile, oozing with mud from the endless rains. Del Toro has populated it with odd creatures - Pan, for one (Doug Jones). Yet this isn't a film overloaded with special effects. The creatures seem mechanically constructed, rather than created with computers. Ofelia's fantasy world is always rooted in her own emotions, ultimately posing the question of whether the power of imagination has a chance against the power of guns. See the film to probe that question further.

Del Toro has many talents. In a field ruled by overstatement, he can give you the delicate gesture and elicit the same from his actors. He can mix palettes of realism and fantasy to bring plausibility to a story that you might otherwise find outrageous. In his world, the fabulous creatures are struggling as much as anyone else.

Bear in mind that this story is set against the background of a war that was won by Spanish fascists, killing millions of civilians and forcing many more into exile, all with the support of Hitler and Mussolini. (We'll have to wait for Sofia Coppola to make a lavishly-costumed saga about those lonely misunderstood fascists.) This is not a film into which you can escape. Purists (if there are any left out there, especially in the world of commercial cinema) might wonder whether a subject as serious and little-known among Americans today as the Spanish Civil War should be addressed through the lens of horror. Picasso certainly thought so. Remember Guernica, Picasso's monochromatic look into the hell of a village literally torn apart by a German bombing in 1939. The Nazis were all too happy, not just out of ideological kinship, to put tanks, bombers and troops in the service of Spanish fascism. This was the testing ground for the horror that was to come. And Guernica, horrifying as it is and certainly was at the time, is just the most famous of those images. Picasso deliberately chose grotesquery as the way to portray what was happening in Spain at that time, even in obscene cartoons that he drew of Francisco Franco. It would be a prelude to the palette and the imagery of his work during the darker times of World War II.

In other words, Guillermo del Toro has company, not just in his signature grotesquery mourning the loss of innocence that he shares with (among others) Picasso. The fabulously rich popular culture of Republican Spain drew on the same visual vocabulary. (Use the occasion of Del Toro exhuming this moment in history in Pan's Labyrinth to discover it.) This was the land of Salvador Dalí, ever the opportunist, who made image after transgressive image scorning and ridiculing the Church, and then chose the side of power when he sensed which way the wind was blowing. Dalí only painted what he thought was the edge. He didn't live there.

Even before Picasso painted Guernica, the Spanish Republicans (remember, these Republicans were the anti-fascists) printed posters by the thousands showing the post-mortem faces of children killed in fascist bombings and demanding the world outside Spain act on its moral revulsion. A Mexican working in Spain, making a child his protagonist, in a country ravaged by war but not fully defeated, Del Toro is well within the tradition of that visual (and) moral war for hearts and minds. What he seems to be saying here, is that, after losing the war on the battlefield (for the most part), all that the moral survivors in Spain were left with were their hearts and minds. For Ofelia, and for Del Toro, that's still quite a lot.

More on Del Toro and a lineup of NYFF favorites in a final dispatch.

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2006 11:25 AM