"Pan's Labyrinth," a Review

If Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties" is the best film ever made about Hitlerism, without question Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is the greatest film ever made on the subject of fascism as a whole.

The publicity for this film misrepresents it as a fantasy, which it is, but hardly on the order of "The Secret Garden." Set in 1944 the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War. It addresses the subject in poignant and painful detail on both the fantastic and the extremely graphic levels. It is a great work of art.

If like myself, you find the whole oeuvre of western film in the last few years a dreary, and predictable grind of apolitical corporate slop, "Pan's Labyrinth" will remind you why you loved movies in the first place. It is brilliantly acted by the entire large cast with a sort of vocational dedication to mood and character. Though subtitled, even your high school Spanish will be enough to catch the eloquence of the script and its constant irony as it is spoken with a lyrical Castellan lilt. The direction and cinematography range from the unflinchingly spare to the lush beyond description. None of it is just there to fill up the screen with dazzling clap trap, or ponderous, vacant starkness.

The true power of the film lies in its passionate indictment of fascism as a parasitic world view that infects and corrupts all things around it. The double curse of mythic nationalism and blind obedience to unreason invade this world in a way so perverse that we are fascinated even as we recoil.
No one and nothing in this film is untouched by the filthy taint of it even when they inhabit world's far removed from the Spain in the 1940s.

Most of all the film unswervingly shows that once having bitten the apple of fascism, cleansing the system of it is a hard, long, violent and horrid process. That is made worse in all cases by accommodating it. You cannot reason with unreason. You cannot render the criminal justifiable by argument. In the end, a fascist can never turn back from their commitment, and their victims must never forgive or forget. The price of getting it wrong and failing to purge the system of its rot, is too high. At times we cannot all get along because we should not.

It took Spain three generations to throw off its fascist domination with the death of Francisco Franco in the 1970s. Only death undid the apparatus that he held in his hand for a lifetime. The film is a brilliant and sharp lesson for those who would turn the other cheek to fascism or simply turn away because they are afraid of its tyrannical face. They will pay that much more in the end for their folly.

Beyond that, "Pan's Labyrinth" is a work of incredible sensual beauty in the best sense of what that can mean. Even if you never go to the movies, make an effort to see this one. It is a landmark of our time.

Steven Hart