Word: panning
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...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...
...This sylvan realm is populated by stickbugs that morph into fairies, a toad the size of a Studebaker and, ruling them all, a seven-foot-tall Pan, the goat-god. He knows Ofelia as soon as she enters his underground home, identifying her as the long-lost Princess Moanna. He tells her she will reach her destiny - will "stroll through the seven circular gardens of your palace" - if she can accomplish three difficult tasks. One is to get a key that the toad has swallowed. The second: use that key to unlock a door in the lair of the Pale...
...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...
...Toro calls Pan's Labyrinth a child's dark fantasy for adults. Certainly it's not for children. Even the grown-up audience in Cannes was jolted by the Captain's acts of violence towards others (he shoots a suspect in cold blood after smashing his face to pulp with a broken bottle) and himself. The scene in which, after having his own cheek cut open, he sutures a pretty severe gash in his mouth, earned the audience's applause...
...Most "adult" is Del Toro's belief that the world into which young minds soar or retreat is fragile indeed. The ending should not be revealed, except to say I've never encountered it in a children's book nor movie. While Ofelia burrows into Pan's labyrinth, the world outside - the real one - plays by a harsher, more violent, set of rules. Learning the difference is the beginning of maturity, the end of childhood innocence...