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Into the depths of Franco’s Spain: Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno)

A film by Guillermo del Toro

By Paul Bond
11 January 2007

All too often, fantastic films are a disappointment,telling us nothing about reality or patronising us with infantile escapism. It was a relief, then, to find that Pan’s Labyrinth, by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, is a serious piece of work,making profound use of its fantasy.

It is set in Spain, 1944. The Civil War is over, although resistance to the fascists continues. The heavily pregnant Carmen (Ariadna Gil) is travelling to meet hernew husband, the Falangist Captain Vidal (an excellent performance by Sergi Lopez). With her is Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), her daughter by her first marriage. Ofelia travels with armfuls of books of fairytales. Doctors think Carmen should not travel, but Vidal insists “a son should be born where his father is.”

Vidal is hunting the resistance. A stickler for punctuality and military formality, hewants his son to be born in Franco’s “new Spain”—which he will create by brute force if necessary. “The war is over and we won,” he says, and he is determined to kill all resisters to prove it. Thefascists’ sadistic repression is brought out in some terrible and violent sequences, such as Vidal beating a poacher to death with a bottle.

Vidal’s concern is his unborn son. If there is a choice,he tells the doctor, “save the baby.” Vidal has a watch with a broken face, carried by his father in Morocco. His father broke the watch as he died, so his son might know the time of a brave man’sdeath. Vidal is determined to create a mythology of such heroism as part of the building of fascist Spain.

This creation of fascist mythologies is an important use of fantasy within the film, and isrepeatedly contrasted to reality. Vidal, bristling with machismo, fails to notice that his trusted housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) is spying for the resistance. She was invisible to him because...