Word: labyrinth
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...quick report on the closing ceremony, come on back here around 10p.m. Paris time, 4p.m. EDT, for a quick report on the winners. Meanwhile, we wanted to tell you about two movies: one that's among our favorites at this year's festival, Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, and another, John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, that points, more clearly than any recent film, in a provocative direction the cinema could take...
...Labyrinth was shown Saturday, the Festival's final day of competition. That's the graveyard slot here. By the 11th day, many of the Cannes conventioneers have departed, and the Jury presumably has a good idea of their award preferences by then. For a last-day film to win the Palme d'Or would be like a public access show at two in the morning copping the top spot in the Nielsen ratings...
...Well, who cares? Pan's Labyrinth is terrific. It sets an Alice in Wonderland fantasy in the desperate conflict of fascists and insurgents in Franco's Spain, 1944. An Army officer, the brutal Capt. Vidal (Sergi López), has married and impregnated a young widow (Araidna Gil), bringing her and her 11-year-old daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to a house in the rebel zone he is patrolling. Ofelia, fiercely loyal to her mother and dead father, and rightly suspicious of the Captain, feels the force of strange creatures from the moment she arrives at her new home. While...
...Toro is known for the horror movies (Cronos, Hellboy) that he has directed in Hollywood and his native Mexico. They're quite sophisticated, but nothing in them prepared viewers for the narrative richness and emotional gravity of Pan's Labyrinth - Lewis Carroll meets Luis...
...source is Del Toro's own capacious imagination. The inverted logic of a child's dreams rarely has had such a secure equilibrium. And it is brilliantly visualized by Guillermo Navarro's cinematography, a severe symphony of dark shades in the house, more dramatic color contrasts in the labyrinth...