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film/dvd review: “pan’s labyrinth” directed by guillermo del toro

August 9th, 2007

AT THE CINEMA
With Ron Boyer



***** Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). If you’re curious, but haven’t seen it yet, now is the time to enjoy one of the truly outstanding films of the last year, recently released on DVD. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (No, not Benicio del Toro, the actor-the other one!), Pan’s Labyrinth was my favorite film last year. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Pan’s Labyrinth lost out to the equally brilliant and socially-relevant drama The Lives of Others, arguably the two most important films of 2006.

Pan’s Labyrinth seamlessly weaves two storylines together-the first a moving historical drama set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the second a mythic fairytale journey of a young girl. Set in 1944 during the cruel reign of Franco, the first story involves a young girl and her pregnant mother, a widow, who move to a remote outpost to join the mother’s villainous new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez, Dirty Pretty Things), a brutal officer whose mission is to hunt down members of the resistance and crush them under his iron fascist boot. The second story begins shortly after the shy, introverted girl Ofelia (newcomer Ivana Baquero) arrives at the outpost. She is called to adventure one day when she chases a strange-looking fairy into the opening of an ancient labyrinth leading into the depths of the underworld. There she encounters the horned mythical figure Pan, the faun of the title (Doug Jones), in his timeless lair. Thus begins the second storyline as Pan reveals Ofelia’s true identity: She is really a Princess lost to her parents and their mythical realm through a curse. Pan mentors the girl in her quest to recover her true destiny, offering her three successive magical trials of increasing peril as her means to escape the curse. Upon her success or failure ride both the fate of the girl herself and the fate of their mythic world. Will she fail and be banished to the mortal human world forever? Or will she recover her true immortal destiny and find her way home to the realm of magic where her royal parents await her with open arms? Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz or Frodo in Lord of the Rings, Ofelia embarks on a perilous and lonely journey of self-discovery through a land of dark enchantment in search of her true home, her true self (identity) and her true destiny. As the story unfolds, Ofelia’s mythic struggle against underworld monsters merges seamlessly with her battle against the evil of the real world, personified by her wicked stepfather, Vidal. In the end, the realities of the two worlds-the subjective fantasy world of the Princess and objective so-called “real” world of the girl Ofelia-are fused together in the stunning climax to the film.

This fantasy unfolds as a marvelous archetypal fairytale that, if not for the extreme violence and adult themes of the dramatic storyline of the war, would have made a fantastic children’s film. In this tale, the pre-teen heroine Ofelia takes a classic hero journey into an otherworldly realm peopled with magical creatures on a quest to recover her immortal destiny; unless she succeeds, the Princess is cursed to live in the real and mortal world of humans, a world filled with suffering and death. For anyone familiar with Jungian psychology or the archetypal imagery of the hero quest described by Joseph Campbell, this film is a textbook case of mythic structure in storytelling. Like other great classic hero journeys (e.g., Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Ring’s trilogy or The Wizard of Oz) Pan’s Labyrinth is filled from beginning to end with archetypal motifs and symbols found abundantly in mythology and fairytales the world over. From the beginning of Ofelia’s “call to adventure” (Campbell’s “involuntary departure”) to enter an “other world” into which she is initiated by the fairy guide (in the form of the underworld labyrinth into which she descends like the Trojan hero Aeneas, the classic nekyia journey of the ancient Greek heroes) where she is opposed by dangerous powers (e.g., a blind cannibalistic monster) and aided by “magical helpers” (e.g., the fairies and Pan himself) to the equally archetypal ending, the film faithfully employs the symbolism and thematic motifs common to myth and fairytale everywhere. Here, in the Oz-like other world if the labyrinth, the heroine Ofelia confronts the classic series of ordeals typical of fairytales and hero quests (Campbell’s “road of trials”) and in the end achieves the hero’s apotheosis through self-sacrifice, death and symbolic rebirth. Finally, she participates in what Jung called the mystical hieros gamos or royal wedding, an image borrowed from ancient alchemy that lies at the unconscious heart of Hollywood’s obsession with and depiction of the “happy ending”.

During the past few years, del Toro has risen quickly to the top of my A-list of favorite new filmmakers. I enjoyed watching his early effort in Devil’s Backbone (shades of Bunuel) and my appreciation grew by leaps and bounds with his wonderfully entertaining big-budget Hollywood blockbuster based on the comic book franchise Hellboy-one of the best comic book film adaptations ever made. With Pan’s Labyrinth he has established himself at another level entirely as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. Together with directors Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel)-del Toro’s close colleagues and friends-he completes a powerful troika of great emerging Hispanic filmmakers.

Del Toro is a director to watch, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a perfect film: a visually stunning cinematic masterpiece with a haunting score matched perfectly by a timeless tale of tragedy and rebirth. The result is a beautiful fairytale for thinking adults. For this reviewer, it doesn’t get much better than that.

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Hidden Places, Private Spaces and Stealing Art in the Subway

July 15th, 2007

Although new to Toronto, I had already heard of the Wedge Gallery through artsy friends long before I received an invitation to attend the opening, on May 31, of a new exhibit featuring a recently published art book, FLAVA. The book, released on the 10th anniversary of the gallery, offers a collection of portraits and images representing some of the best photographers in the world, most of whom are featured at the gallery. The Wedge, as it’s popularly called, is a groundbreaking effort by Toronto dentist, musician and patron of the arts, Kenneth Montague, designed as a global showcase documenting black culture/s through fine photography.

The new art book, FLAVA: WEDGE CURATORIAL PROJECTS (1997-2007) is a retrospective catalogue showcasing a decade of fresh, eye-opening photo-based exhibitions and special events at the gallery that have generated buzz both in Toronto and worldwide. Established to inform both local and global communities about black art, Wedge created an exhibit space to show images of community life, landscapes and the faces of the black diaspora – images too often hidden and underappreciated in the public eye. FLAVA collects some of the best artwork Montague has exhibited since beginning in 1997 from the unique gallery he created in the hallway and dining room of his own home, a loft on Richmond Street West, but soon outgrew.

Montague started the gallery in order to provide an outlet through which “ordinary people – like myself – could share their own stories through art.” His efforts touched not only the grassroots but caught the attention of international art critics like Professor Deborah Willis of New York University.

“Within the past ten years Wedge has engaged in a tremendous amount of activity-collecting, cataloguing, publishing and presenting new and extraordinary ideas,” says Professor Willis, who credits Montague for challenging established institutions to be more diverse – not only in terms of subject matter, but in terms of how art is displayed and made accessible to the community at large. Among many original tactics in Wedge’s decade of exhibitions, FLAVA recounts the time Montague created subway posters from the images for a new exhibit. The posters themselves became so popular that the Toronto Transit Commission struggled to keep them on the walls because so many were stolen!
That kind of excitement, says filmmaker and art historian Julie Crooks, is why so many are “indebted to Kenneth Montague for pursuing his vision and giving us moments that were empowering, inspirational and revelatory.”

Although the FLAVA tour launched May 31st with its accompanying exhibition at the Burroughes Building, 639 Queen Street West, Ground Level, held until June 3rd, the exhibit will be traveling internationally and another fine exhibit will open at the Wedge in the near future. For more information about current and future Wedge Gallery exhibitions, and the FLAVA book and exhibit tour, contact the gallery’s publicist, Charmain Emerson, Building Blocks Communications, 416-588-8514; or Marie Lortie, Wedge Curatorial Projects marie@wedgegallery.com; or visit the website www.wedgegallery.com.

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Film Review: “Ten Canoes”. Directed by Rolf de Heer.

July 9th, 2007

AT THE CINEMA with Ron Boyer

*** Ten Canoes. In this visually beautiful but wandering story-within-a-story by filmmakers Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr, we are introduced to the fascinating and magical world of an exotic and primitive people, the Yolngu Aborigines of Australia’s Northern Territories. Part anthropological field work and part epic ancient legend, the parallel storylines begin a millennia ago (about the time William the Conqueror invaded England), then use that time as a point of departure to visit the primordial past, the mythical Paleolithic “dreamtime” of the Aborigines. The twin stories unfold as an ancient aboriginal leader relates a much more ancient legend of his people, a parable of how a tribal leader in a similar position to his own once addressed the difficult moral and social problem confronting him, with the fate of the tribe hanging in the balance.

The story, narrated by famed Aborigine actor David Gupilil (de Heer’s The Tracker, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout) develops slowly in the authentic if long-winded style of aboriginal oral tradition, inherited from the timeless past, as ten tribesmen in canoes (the “ten canoes” of the title) enter the croc-infested Arfura Swamp of Australia’s Northern Territories on their traditional, annual quest for goose-eggs. There, the leader Minygululu (Peter Minygululu) learns that his younger brother, Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, David’s son), who has no wife of his own, covets one of Minygululu’s wives. In response, the wise elder Minygululu relates a story to Dayindi intended to dissuade him from violating a sacred tribal taboo and disrupting the delicate equilibrium of the community. The story he tells, set in the mythical past of their tribal ancestors, concerns two men who once found themselves in an identical predicament: the leader of an ancient foraging party in this very swamp—Ridjimararil (Crusoe Kurddal), and his brother Yeeraliparil (also played by Jamie Gulpilil) who also lusted after his older brother’s wife. The cautionary tale of forbidden love (is there any other kind?) teaches a moral lesson to Dayindi, because Yeeraliparil’s coveting of Ridjimararil’s wife brings tragic consequences to the tribe, upsetting its social balance and resulting in an escalating drama of intra-tribal conflicts, kidnapping, sacrifice, revenge, black arts and even murder.

The lengthy tale related by Minygululu is at once tragic and funny, one of the many charms of this film. Comedy, it might be said, is tragedy viewed with a sense of the absurd. The sometimes off-color humor of the Yolngu people, as they alternate between sad clown and happy clown, is disarming and expresses an intrinsic universality at the heart of the story. That an ancient, faraway people enjoy a good, adolescent fart joke as much as we do, appeals to something universal in our nature that transcends time and place. This timeless quality is reinforced by the film’s authenticity expressed in its realistic primitive setting and convincing performances by the cast, mostly ordinary local tribal folk “self-casted” by the aboriginal community to which actor David Gulpilil belongs and who still inhabit these ancient ancestral lands in the Northern Territories. This lends authority and “fictional truth” to the tale that shines through despite the fact that filmmaker de Heer invented much of the story himself based on news accounts and bits of folklore.

Filmed on location by de Heer, who, along with his crew, lived among the Yolngu practically as a member of their community while filming, another of the movie’s virtues is that it offers a rare glimpse of what historian of religions Mircea Eliade called an “archaic society” in its natural surroundings. The Aborigines of Australia are one of the few surviving ancient cultures that, in spite of the often destructive impact of modern civilization, remain more or less in tact, still in harmony with the natural (and supernatural) world.

While I personally enjoyed the slow, meandering style of the storytelling, similar as it is to the more loquacious unfolding of narrative typical in classic literature, it can be a bit confusing and tiresome at times. I like the authenticity of the style, which faithfully mimics the oral storytelling tradition of all primitive cultures before the advent of writing. However, the mainstream contemporary movie-going audience, impatient as it is, conditioned to receiving information from the mass media in bite-sized fragments, and desirous of cutting immediately to the chase, is more likely to see and enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean than a relatively obscure little film like this, with its wandering, less than dramatic storytelling. But for those of us who enjoy a good yarn and for whom special effects and complex yet fairly predictable plots aren’t everything—and who enjoy immersing ourselves occasionally in faraway times and places just for the novel experience and perspective gained (e.g., those of us who enjoy reading or watching National Geographic)—exploring the aboriginal world depicted here is a refreshing treat.

I, for one, applaud director de Heer—and his colleagues, cast and crew—for his attempt to fictionalize, and hence make more accessible and entertaining, tall tales of the Aborigines. Insofar as he faithfully mimics their oral tradition in pictures, he helps preserve what might become, unfortunately, a vanishing culture—and one that embodies an ancient wisdom we moderns should learn from. First and foremost, de Heer is an anthropologist and only secondarily a filmmaker. If Ten Canoes at times nearly lulls us to sleep from its meandering dialogue and lack of tight plots, it succeeds brilliantly as social science. Any anthropologist who can turn typically dry accounts of field studies into entertaining fictional storytelling—transforming statistical facts into artistic truth—is to be encouraged. In such pathless yet important terrain, de Heer finds himself slashing his own way through the wilderness on the leading edge of social science. We can only hope for more of the same from him, and other scientifically-oriented filmmakers, in the future.

A favorite on the festival circuit since it won an award at Cannes, Ten Canoes is a film worth watching. And if you liked The Gods Must Be Crazy or Walkabout, this may be a “can’t miss” film for you.

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Ron’s Ratings Guide:

* Stinker. Don’t waste your time unless you’re a kid and like “so bad it’s good” movies. Earns an automatic nomination for the annual Razzy film award.
** Flawed. Probably not worth seeing, or reviewing. Some redeeming qualities, but save your money for Starbucks and watch it later on TV for free.
*** Solid. A genuinely good, entertaining film. Definitely worth watching, this rating includes many box office blockbusters.
**** Excellent. A must see movie, blockbuster or not. Lots of obscure art-house films as well as Oscar-caliber movies and other critically-acclaimed winners, here.
***** Great. Superlatives like “exceptional”, “brilliant”, “stunning”, “perfect” and “breathtaking” apply to these award-worthy, top caliber films. As good as it gets. Watch for them at the Golden Globes, Oscars, and other prominent award venues.

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