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.
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