I know next to nothing about the Spanish Civil War except that it happened and a bunch of French and American intellectuals attempted to led their overly pampered hands to the fight against Franco. I don't know much more about it now, either.
I have learned: fascism = bad. rebels in woods = good. torture = bad, but pornographically voyeuristically (supposedly) fun to watch (ick). people, particularly evil ones, are often sexist. children are our future. watching blood and guts slowly implode = cool (ick). violence is beautiful (ick).
It seems that filmmakers have realised that the audience is desensitised to violence. Instead of finding another way to articulate the horror of violence, power, and war, they simply make the violence more and more hyper-real. It's not realism. Realism is the fist fight where after the first punch the two people are groveling in pain on the floor, and half the punches don't land properly, and the two individuals aren't built like Mr. Universe. What we have in Pan's Labyrinth is hyper-realism: a fantasy world of pops and fizzles and hands cut open and amputations and sewing up one's face. Perhaps the message is that Franco's Spain is a fantasy world just as the world the child constructs in the film is also a fantasy world. Or that both are equally real.
If that's the message, which is fine, and I would be excited about, except that it's done incredibly poorly. Why are there no links between the underground fantasy world and the Franco world? I'm talking narrative links, metaphorical links, intertwined 'tasks'? The two spaces don't overlap narratively--it's the old two 'intertwined' narratives that don't ever quite speak to one another. (This seems to be a pattern in contemporary filmmaking. See David Denby's brilliant piece on this in the New Yorker.) So we have a (children's) fantasy film interspersed with a film about Fascism's badness, and neither really works.
I decry the lack of art in this film: I have seen this all before. In the other Labyrinth film, for example. (an unfair comparison, obviously, as any David Bowie film will of course beat any other non-David Bowie film. duh.) In the violence of the clips from 300. This isn't helping us to see how condoning torture is hurting our society. It isn't helping us to see how living in certain authoritarian regimes utterly changes the power dynamic and thus forces good people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's not a study in politics or psychology or war. It's a pornographic exploration of violence and evil. We don't need that. I'd love to see this film again, except this time make the evil guy human and complicated. Show us why everyone follows him. Why does the mother marry him? Explore some of the class issues barely whispered in the film. Link the fantasy elements more clearly and directly (yet subtly) with the 'real' elements. Make the collapsing of the two explicit and do it for a reason. Don't show us the violence through special effects--make us feel it through the crackling of it in the dialogue. And please don't smuggle in some half-baked God the Father glowy stuff at the end. Please.
Next: Real violence...Dogville!
2 comments:
I wrote a bit about this film too and I guess you would find the writing just as bad. That's because, while I agree with what you say, I also think that you can watch it in a different perspective that does not require the kind of things you ask of it.
I feel you just looked for one side that is not there and this might have to do with taste but it is not very profitable. I thought a better way to watch this movie is to see it as a poem, a piece of stylized and concentrated pack of emotion that, despite the intensity, appear at a very contained pace.
You are not supposed to understand any discursive complexity but I think you are suppose to go through some complexity of emotion. That's all. I believe that in order to enjoy it you have to give up the thinking and let yourself go with the flow of it. You might hate to lose control like that but there is still something you can 'learn' from it.
If you can do that I am curious if the second time you'll like it better. I will try your way.
The film may well be worth reconsidering. I shared some of these concerns - not so much the violence but the lack of metaphorical connection between the fantasy world and the real world and the seemingly trite nature of the political analysis (innocence corrupted etc.). However, I rethought the question of the difficulty, still, of making a film about this period (when they are made they are, notably, not made by Spaniards) and I discussed it with a Hispanic/Film specialist. I think I missed a lot of it. Apparently the film is, amongst other things, an extended dialogue with and commentary on Spanish and Spanish speaking cinema paticularly Spirit of the Beehive and the fantasy elements involve various symbolic aspects that my bland protestant English self missed (e.g. the hands of the monster carry stigmata and are then transformed into the sign of Opus Dei. These things, I am told, resonated very much with Spanish audiences. It is worth remembering that in a sense they don't need a subtle rendering of the divisions because many have not yet come to terms with the fact that the long years of fascist rule were actually all that bad. For many to be reminded that the Fascist forces were brutal, er, fascists, is itself dramatic and forceful. They are still uncovering the bodies and still have a lot to find.
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