The Great Movies III

The faun seems to be both good and evil; what are we to make of a huge pile of used shoes, especially worrisome in the time of the Holocaust? But what he actually offers is not good or evil, but the choice between them, and Del Toro says in a commentary that Ofelia is "a girl who needs to disobey anything except her own soul." The whole movie, he says, is about choices.

The faun fits neatly into Ofelia's worries about her pregnant mother; he gives her a mandrake root to hide under the mother's bed and feed with two drops of blood daily. The mandrake root is said to resemble a penis, but this one, in special effects that are beyond creepy, looks like a half-baby made from wood, leaves, and earth. Ofelia discovers that Carmen is aiding the rebels, but keeps her secret because she doesn't want to be responsible for hurting anyone, a trait that will benefit her.

The film is visually stunning. The creatures do not look like movie creations but like nightmares (especially the Pale Man, with eyes in the palms of his hands). The baroque organic look of the faun's lair is unlike any place I have seen in the movies. When the giant frog delivers up a crucial key in its stomach, it does so by regurgitating its entire body, leaving an empty frog skin behind. Meanwhile, Vidal plays records on his phonograph, smokes, drinks, shaves as if tempting himself to slash his throat, speaks harshly to his wife, threatens the doctor, and shoots people.

Del Toro moves between many of these scenes with a moving foreground wipe-an area of darkness, or a wall or a tree that wipes out the military and wipes in the labyrinth, or vice versa. This technique insists that his two worlds are not intercut, but live in edges of the same frame. He portrays most of the mill interiors in a cold blue-grey slate, but introduces life tones into the faces of characters we favor, and into the fantasy world. It is no coincidence that the bombs of the rebels introduce red and yellow explosions into the monotone world they attack.

Guillermo del Toro (born 1964) is the most challenging of directors in the fantasy field because he invents from scratch, or adapts into his own vision. He has made six features since his debut at twenty-nine with Cronos (1993), and I have admired, even loved, all of them, even those like Hellboy, Mimic, and Blade II that did not receive the universal acclaim of Cronos and The Devil's Backbone (a ghost story also set in Franco's Spain). He is above all a visually oriented director, and when he says "films are made of looks,"I think he is referring not only to the gazes of his actors but to his own.

Born in Mexico, he has worked there and overseas, like his gifted friends and contemporaries Alfonso Cuaron (born 1961) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (born 1963). Isn't it time to start talking about a New Mexican Cinema, not always filmed in Mexico but always informed by the imagination and spirit of the nation? Think of Del Toro's remarkable films, and then consider too Cuaron's Children ofMen, Harry Potter and the Prisoner OfAzkaban (the best-looking Potter film), Great Expectations (an overlooked masterpiece), and Y Tu Mamd Tambien. Or Inarritu's Amores Perros, 2z Grams, and Babel.

Some of these are in one way or another genre films, but there is so much impact and intensity, and such a richness of visual imagination, that they flatter their genres instead of depending on them. The three directors trade actors and technicians, support each other, make new rules, are successful without compromise. Cuaron's 1998 Great Expectations, set in a Spanish-moss-dripping modern Florida and starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anne Bancroft (in guess which roles), is a stunning reworking of Dickens and illustrates how all three of these directors can put hands on a project and make it their own.

What makes Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth so powerful, I think, is that it brings together two kinds of material, obviously not compatible, and insists on playing true to both, right to the end. Because there is no compromise there is no escape route, and the dangers in each world are always present in the other. Del Toro talks of the "rule of three" in fables (three doors, three rules, three fairies, three thrones). I am not sure three viewings of this film would be enough, however.