Pan's Labyrinth is set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a bloody war in a century of bloody wars, which, because the war which followed it was bloodier on a far greater scale, tends to be overlooked if you're not Spanish.
The setting says something crucial about
Guillermo Del Toro. There's plenty of fantasy in his films, but that's far from all there is. You don't use the aftermath of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War as a backdrop (in this film or in
Devil's Backbone, set at the war's outbreak) if you're churning out escapism, unless you happen to be a diehard fascist or a diehard communist who sees ideological purity in this battle between good and evil. It's probably safe to say that this director is neither.
In
Pan's Labyrinth, the war still hasn't ended in 1944 - a key date, given that the most important turn against Hitler in Western Europe came in that year. Republican anti-fascist partisans are fighting an insurgency (God forbid) against an army unit that has taken over a farmhouse in the hills that are supposed to be in the forests of Navarra in the North. This triumphant Spanish army would be in power until 1975 - the longest-ruling fascist regime of the 20th century. Not a badge of honor.
The soldiers who have slaughtered most of their opposition have also taken prisoners, in this case the wife and child of one of their victims. (They are not precisely prisoners, but seem to have been carried away as spoils of war, evoking images of the Roman victories of two thousand years earlier. No coincidence - Spain is full of Roman ruins.) The wife (
Ariadna Gil), widow of a tailor, is carrying the child of the sadistic Captain Vidal who is in command of the army unit. Her daughter, Ofelia (
Ivana Baquero), already fears and loathes the man whom she's told to call her father. She'll find much more to despise as she sees more of the man at work.
Few of the characters will survive Del Toro's tale of good battling evil. The spiritual world, populated by sprites, a faun (
Doug Jones) and other creatures, is a refuge for the young Ofelia. This is the labyrinth, after all. (It's odd that Del Toro hasn't thrown a priest into the mix, since the Church aligned itself with the fascists and Catholicism held a stranglehold on the official spiritual life of Spain for so long.)
Besides being a fairy tale, this is a war movie, and a violent one, and you can look at it as an ode to an insurgency. (In Iraq, we've moved from insurgency to civil war; here we move from civil war to insurgency.) Everyone - mother, daughter, doctor, maid and cook - is conspiring against the army of occupation, which will be the government for 30 years to come. The vain phallocratic Captain (
Sergi Lopez) galvanizes the household in opposition.
Guillermo Navarro's camera divides the world in two - the angular, upright realm of domination, and the dark, curved sanctuaries of the spirit. Sometimes a single shot freezes what looks like a comic book panel, defining a dramatic relationship by the scale of the figures in the frame. You can guess who seems smaller. Other times, it's the light. Del Toro says in the interview below that he and Navarro were inspired by
Symbolist painting of the late 19th century. It reminded me of religious painting, mostly portraits of saints by the 17th century Spanish painter
Esteban Murillo.
The gray-blue palette of sacred pictures seems right for a hymn to innocence. But the innocent can also defend themselves, and they do in this dense symbol-laden story where eleven year-old Ofelia is forced into a scheme against the occupiers. Bear in mind that the Spanish Civil War was the war that the Fascists won, in spite of lingering resistance that continued for years. It inspired
Guernica,
Picasso's huge painting of a nightmarish bombing of a Basque town. This was war against civilians, in which entire cities were bombed. It was also the first modern media war, with aerial newsreel footage of battles that were proving grounds for new weapons, post-mortem photographs of dead babies on the covers of newspapers and global fundraising campaigns promoted on posters that were surreal collages. The whole world watched.
Looking back on the dark times, and on the years of hope that preceded it, a veteran of the defeated Republican cause recalled, "We had the best songs." Songs only go so far.
I spoke to Guillermo Del Toro about his film, the Spanish Civil War and directing in English and Spanish.
Why did you want to make a film about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath?
Devil's Backbone was already that.
What's important about the Spanish Civil War to you?
Growing up in Mexico, the Civil War was very important because the contact between Spain and Mexico was very active. A lot of Spaniards fled to Mexico and they were influential figures in the arts and the culture. They became people that I learned to respect, and in some instances I met them. One of them even became a mentor, a father figure:
Emilio Garcia Riera, who used to be the most highly regarded historian of film in Mexico. I seem to be the only one making the films about it. In literature, there are some works by Mexicans that deal with the Spanish Civil War, and in the arts, there were some painters and sculptors who did work that was linked to figures who left Spain, that were directly related to the war.
Were any of the characters in the film based on historical figures?
Some of the war sequences in the film were based on oral accounts of particular executions or torture that I read in books. And they are a compilation of those things. The type of military men, and the squadron that Vidal has, was involved early early on in the suppression of some of the rebel resistance in the North. But this is not actually factual as it appears in the film.
How much resistance was there by this point, in 1944?
That's one of the points of the movie. Most people think that the Civil War ended in 1939, but in reality the last rebels, the leader of the group that was called the Maquis, he was executed past the middle of the 20th century, in the 1960s. The resistance in Spain was very brave, and it held from 1939 into the 1940s, because they were hoping that the Allies would turn around and help them after World War II. The resistance in Spain was actively involved in, for example, sabotaging the shipping of tungsten from the mines in Galicia to Germany to build the Panzer tanks. So they were really actively fighting the Nazis, and they were evidently rewarded with absolute indifference after the war.
It seems that you're drawing a distinction between the macho literal-mindedness of the Captain and the rich fantasy life of Ofelia.
It's very much a collection of opposites. The Captain is purely a masculine character, and she is feminine, although that would be oversimplifying it, because both of them have vulnerabilities.
She has a pantheist view of the world.
It's completely pagan. She reflects nothing more and nothing less than the way I viewed the world as a kid. I was brought up Catholic but my personal cosmology was completely pagan.
How do you explain that?
I have no idea, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Mexico and Spain have a certain view of life that is similar in the sense that they have death, brutality, the nature - you know, you live with them and you embrace them in a different way than First World countries would. With syncretism in Latin America, you can embrace a religion by mixing it with your own gods. And then, there's a lot of Celtic culture in the north of Spain, and there are a lot of beautiful pagan legends in Galicia, and in Asturias and in all those places. They combine them with the Catholic religion very cleanly.
Where did you shoot the film?
In Segovia, about an hour away from Madrid. It was made to look as if it were in the northeast of Spain, the Navarra forest, on the border of the Basque region, very close to France.
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