Sunday, February 25, 2007

Pan's Labyrinth

Down to Salisbury yesterday evening to see this beautiful film. The plot is excellently summarised in the Wikipedia entry here. Individually, the elements of the film - Captain Vidal the fascist officer, the mystic fairytale scenes - could easily have come across as stereotypes. But the director has crafted it so that they carefully interlock and convey rightness and a deeper reality.

Yes, there were (and are) people just like that; yes, sometimes we do withdraw into our inner world, dealing with the unbearable through the construction of a parallel narrative of myth and archetype.

NOTE: I thought there was a lot of CGI (computer-generated imagery) in this, but it turns out the faun, and the 'pale man' monster were both a heavily made-up Doug Jones. I don't think the fairies were real, though ...