Labyrinth of Innocence: Pan’s Labyrinth

Guillermo Del Toro’s Academy-Award-winning film El Laberinto del Fauno (known to American audiences as Pan’s Labyrinth), is the story of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a 12-year-old girl in post-Civil War Spain who is moved to a mill out on the countryside after her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) marries the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez). On her first night, Ofelia is visited by a fairy and taken into a mystical labyrinth where a Faun (Doug Jones) tells her that within her lies the spirit of Princess Moana of the Underground World, and she must complete three tasks before the next full moon if she wants to go back to her kingdom. As Ofelia manages her tasks, her wicked stepfather Vidal and his men try to fend off a rebel alliance that hides in the woods, unaware that his trusted housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) is an informant for the rebels. Fantasy and reality co-exist in this morality tale of a fascist world that does not tolerate those that don’t agree with it, and disobedience may have a high price, but it is this lack of obedience that maintains a child’s soul intact.

Franco’s regime in Spain was centered on obedience. Franco was a man who killed all those who didn’t agree with him and kept his country running the way he wanted it. Vidal is the embodiment of Franco. He doesn’t forgive, he doesn’t let anyone go, and he punishes people in the cruelest of ways. We see this early on, when he hits a suspect in the face with a bottle, right in front of his father, before he can finish the search of his belongings, and then kills them both. After they’re both dead, he finds that they were telling the truth but, instead of admitting his mistake, he says “Learn to search these people before coming to bother me.” He also likes to torture people for their shortcomings. When they pick up one of the rebels who has a stuttering problem, Vidal tells him he’ll set him free if he can count to three without stuttering, knowing full well that he’ll never make it to three.

As brutal and confident as Vidal is, he’s also a man who is constantly trying to prove himself to someone, and he feels that the only way to do that is to keep everyone afraid and on a schedule. He’s also taunted by the larger-than-life memory of his own father who smashed his watch against the ground to show his son how a brave man dies. Vidal keeps a watch of his own and holds it every time he feels Death might be approaching. Moreover, he only wanted to marry Carmen so she could have his son, and he could prove himself to that son. Carmen represents those who suffer under Franco. She is trapped in that world and doesn’t know a way out. She’s not as imaginative as her daughter is, so all she can do is stay out of trouble, obey the rules set up by her husband, have the baby and provide a good life for her children. This ultimately becomes her downfall, because the narrow mind that she was forced to acquire kept her from seeing how a force beyond what she believes to be real was curing her and, in the end, she was forced to sacrifice her life to save the life of her newborn child (the captain’s orders to the doctor).

Ofelia is the exact opposite of Vidal, and we see how they start their relationship on the wrong hand (literally). Ofelia does what she feels is right, not what people tell her to do. She has a wild imagination and a very pure way of looking at the people around her, so she takes everything she sees at face value (though the fantasy world may have been all in her head). Her innocent nature and lack of obedience is present in every task she performs. In her first task, she was told not to get her dress dirty, but she chooses to go into the rotting tree and defeat the giant toad, which in the end ruins the dress her mom made her. In the second task, she’s told to let the fairies guide her into the Pale Man’s lair and not to eat or drink anything she may find on the table. As it turns out, the key she got from the toad doesn’t open the door that the fairies told her to open, and she lets her own instincts guide her to open a different door, and because the Pale Man shows no signs of life and there is so much food on the table, she figures no one will notice if two grapes are missing (leading to some horrible consequences). For her final task, the faun tells Ofelia they need a few drops of innocent blood from her little brother, but she refuses to sacrifice him, which ultimately causes the captain to retrieve his son, shoot Ofelia, and spill her blood into the portal. She ultimately descends into her kingdom, as promised by the Faun, where she’s told that she made the right choice by spilling her own blood before the blood of an innocent, which is something no one under Franco would question if they were ordered to do it.

Del Toro seems to favor those who don’t obey, and we see this also in the character of Mercedes. She takes an instant liking to Ofelia, because of her free spirit and reluctance to be pinned down by the captain, which is what Mercedes is fighting for. She works for the captain, but she’s secretly helping the rebels defeat him (partly because one of them is her brother). She’s a strong woman who understands the captain’s weaknesses and knows how to get around the house, and she keeps a knife close to her in case she ever needs it. She pretends to be obedient (and even goes so far as to call herself a coward), while her brother keeps risking his life fighting them.

The film is filled with little allegories and symbols that represent Franco’s Spain. One of them is Ofelia’s first task. It can be said that the toad in the tree is Franco, and the tree is Spain, and the task symbolizes how Franco keeps a tight rule on Spain and won’t let it flourish, so one of her tasks is to get a poisonous ruler out of a tree. There’s also Ofelia and the captain’s first meeting, when Ofelia greets him with her left hand, but Vidal grabs it and says she must greet him with her other hand. While the politics of this film are a little too clear and that may turn some people off (seeing how it paints the conflict as black-and-white), the story is engaging, the characters are unique and fun to follow and the fantasy sequences are breathtaking. As far as performances, my favorite one is Maribel Verdu as Mercedes. She surprises you with a character that is strong and cunning. You don’t mess with Mercedes. Even when she seems frail, you know you have to stay away from her. Ivana Baquero is lovable as Ofelia. She almost broke my heart in the scene where she places her head on her mother’s belly while she sleeps and asks her little brother not to hurt her mother when it’s time to come out. Sergi Lopez never loses sight of his horrible character. He approaches him as a fairy-tale villain, with his one-track mind and his brutality, but still manages to inject a little bit of humanity, particularly in the scene here he’s listening to someone in the table talk about how his father died, and we see how it strikes a chord in him when he denies the story.

The film can be summarized by one line spoken by Dr. Ferreiro, Captain Vidal’s private physician. “It’s just that, obey for obey’s sake, without thinking about it, that’s something only you would do, Captain.” Franco’s rule was about blind obedience and suppression of non-standard art, regional languages, and whatever else Franco didn’t agree with. We may be beyond Franco’s time, but this film teaches us to question people’s orders and be wary of their motives. Blind obedience leads to leaders like Franco, who know that no one will question him, so it’s important to question what we’re told.

Children of Men: A Not-So-Distant Future

What if the world became infertile? What if we knew that humanity would die out before the century is over? Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron explores this question in his 2006 film Children of Men. The film is set in the year 2027 in London, which is probably the only still-functioning city in the world. There hasn’t been a baby born in the last 18 years, and human beings seem to be tearing the world and each other apart. Cuaron takes a very unconventional approach to a futuristic action film by building a world that looks like a darker, more worn down version of our own as opposed to one with robots and flying cars. He explores a very plausible version of a world without the voices of children, without the hopes of a long-term future, and without the need to sugarcoat the violence that happens on the street, because there are no children to protect from the evils of the world. In this world, one man finds what may be the last remaining hope for the survival of mankind, and he must protect it from the political situation of the world they live in. Children of Men explores the issues of terrorism, illegal immigration and societal collapse, and the role they might play twenty years from now.

The film is told through the point of view of Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a depressed former activist who spends his days drinking, smoking and gambling in a state of suspended animation. The film doesn’t tell us anything he doesn’t know, and it doesn’t offer any exposition unless he’s present at the moment. Everything we find out about the world he lives in we see in TV monitors in the buses he rides in, or in the shop where he gets his morning coffee. It is this shop where we learn about the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet who was 18 years old, which further sets the world into despair. Early in the film, Theo is captured by an immigrant-friendly terrorist group called the Fishes (led by his former girlfriend Julian) who ask him to get transit papers for a girl named Kee, whom he later finds out is miraculously pregnant. The Fishes are protecting Kee so they can take her and her baby to the Human Project, a group of scientists looking for the answer to why the human race has not been able to reproduce. But Kee belongs to a world that doesn’t want her, because she is an illegal immigrant. “We're using England as a Green Zone, a comfort zone; the characters feel they're lucky to live there, but there's a big percentage of outsiders waiting to get in,” Cuaron says in an interview with Richard Von Busack of MetroActive.

The most blatant political issue in this film is the plight of illegal immigrants. Throughout the earlier part of the film, we either hear or see a commercial that urges people to report any illegal immigrants that might be living in their neighborhoods or their houses, even if those immigrants are related to or close friends with anyone living in London. The film depicts a culture of illegal immigrants known as “fugees”, which is short for refugees. Fugees are dumped together in camps that resemble the ghettos during the Holocaust, and the guards treat the fugees just as brutally. People are brought into Bexhill (one of the camps and an important location for the later part of the story) in buses, where the guards take these refugees and treat them like animals. Sometimes they’ll go into the buses, put a bag over these people’s heads and shoot them at random. As a Mexican, Cuaron is very close to this issue, since he lives with the issue of MExicans migrating to the States. “I have to question the ethics of borders when there is humanity in need,” he says in his Metroactive interview, “when we start segregating ourselves from what humanity needs ... we lose more and more of the sense of humanity as a whole.”

This political issue in the film is the reason why Kee, the first woman to get pregnant in 18 years, must be hidden from the public. She’s a fugee, and according to Luke and all the Fishes, the British government would never accept that the first baby born in 18 years is the spawn of a fugee. They would find a British woman to pass off as the mother. This issue is brought even further into the forefront when Theo and Kee have to go into Bexhill in order to catch the Tomorrow, the ship that would take Kee to the Human Project. The Fishes, however, have other plans that leave Theo and Kee on their own to catch the boat. Julian is killed early in the film, and that night, while Theo wonders around the house, he overhears Luke and Patric (another Fish) talking about an uprising they’re planning, and they need the baby to unite them and finally give fugees their rights. Apparently, the Fishes killed Julian because she no longer believed in terrorist attacks and she wanted to reach her goals peacefully, but Luke believes that they need a violent demonstration to get people to listen, and this event is the backdrop of the film and the reason why the Fishes chase after Theo and Kee as they try to reach the boat that will take her to the Human Project.

The film also has its political ironies. It explores humanity at the brink of perdition, at a point where the world is beginning to collapse, and yet drugs such as weed are still illegal. We learn this from Jasper, Theo’s hippie best friend who used to be a political cartoonist, but is now a caregiver for his catatonic wife. He grows his own weed which he sells to a guard at Bexhill, which he says is one of the perks of living next to a refugee camp. Euthanasia, however, has been legalized. There’s a product called Quietus that the government has been sending through the mail that allows people to kill themselves if they feel life is unbearable. There’s another scene early in the movie where Theo visits his brother, a rich art collector who continues with his work in beautifying his home by saying that he doesn’t think about the fact that no one will be around in 50 years to see all this. Claudia Puig from USA Today notes that “Picasso's seminal Guernica, hanging in the background of one key scene, creates a potent symbol of a world where art no longer matters and the most educated people sequester themselves rather than seek answers or challenge the status quo.”

Cuaron creates paranoia in this film by constantly trapping Theo and Kee into very small spaces, surrounded by turmoil. In a very impressive early long take, Theo is in a car driven by Luke, with Julian riding shotgun, and Theo is riding in the back with Miriam and Kee. They are suddenly surrounded by terrorists and they try to escape their gunshots and fire but they can’t get out of the car. The camera appears to be desperately looking for a way out, just like the characters, as it turns from the front seat to the back seat, desperately looking out the window. This unconventional long take enhances the feeling of entrapment that these characters have in this world they inhabit. Other scenes like this one include the bus to Bexhill, where they are confined to a seat and they can see the turmoil going on outside, and even that final scene in which Theo and Kee are on a boat, surrounded by water and nowhere to step outside the boat. Even in scenes where Theo is outdoors, we see him leaning up against the wall, making the space around him seem small, surrounded by the sounds of bombs and gunfire. There is another impressive long take in which Theo goes into a building looking for Kee, and people are shooting each other around him. He goes up a very narrow staircase looking for Kee. The camera frantically follows Theo, as he, and the camera, look for a way out, while the politics of what is going on around him have backed him into a corner.

In his review of the film, Roger Ebert said “Often I fear it will all come to this, that the rule of law and the rights of men will be destroyed by sectarian mischief and nationalistic recklessness. Are we living in the last good times?” This is where the strengths of the film lie. It’s set in a time that has not happened yet, but unlike most futuristic films, it feels plausible, because it builds on the current political situation and ages it about two decades to create a dystopia that might not be too far in the horizon. We’re dealing with terrorism and illegal immigration now, just like the characters in this film have to live with it every day.

Works Cited
‘Children of Men’ sends Star Message by Claudia Puig, December 22nd, 2006 http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2006-12-21-children-of-men_x.htm
Making the Future: Richard Van Busack talks to Alfonso Cuaron about filming Children of Men, January 10, 2007 http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.10.07/alfonso-cuaron-0702.html
Review of ‘Children of Men’ by Roger Ebert, October 5th, 2007 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071004/REVIEWS/710040307/1023