April 4: Pan's Labyrinth (2006 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★★★
 

What a step from Cronos to Pan’s Labyrinth!  This film does so much more, is so much more compelling, and holds its unusual tone so much better than Cronos does.  This is one of those rare films that’s actually better than I remembered.

Of course, there’s the fantasy element here with the amazing Faun and Pale Man; they’re the stuff of creep shows.  But it’s not just chills and thrills here.  The film has two realms (the fantasy world and the real world), and both have a dark feeling about them where awful things can (and do) happen.  Part of the tension in the movie is that we learn quickly that Labyrinth isn’t timid about horrid violence, and knowing that creates a lot of suspense in various scenes.  The evil father is capable of the terrible violence with a distinct sado-masochistic element, and the Faun always seems like he could as easily kill Ofelia as crown her princess.  Resistance leaders get shot at point blank range, and fairies get their heads bitten off.  Menace and violence dominate both realms.

And there’s a connection of some kind between these two worlds.  Both, for example, have keys, and both have prohibitions and other rules.  Actions in one world can affect the other, too.  For example, the mandrake root comes from the fantasy world but works (or not) in the real. 

Which leads to the most pleasing aspect of the movie for me, its ambiguity.  You can’t really nail down the connection between reality and fantasy here because the echoes and links between the two aren’t sharp.  I had the overwhelming temptation to see the fantasy world as the way Ofelia dealt with the horror she experienced in her life, but there was no way to connect events like the attack to what was happening Ophelia’s world.  In fact, I even got to the point where I couldn’t be sure that the fantasy world was fantasy, at least in terms of the movie.  I’m still not sure if I think the fantasy world was Ophelia’s hallucination or if it was real and that she was the only one who could see it.  There is a lot of eye imagery in the film, after all, in both the real and fantasy realms.

There are many other engaging elements of the film like repeated images, parallel plot actions, and meticulous color schemes, but the important thing is that they’re all tied together organically by the hand of a most capable director.  And this adult can still enjoy a good story told right…and enjoy it even more on the second go-round.

April 3: Cronos (1998 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★

I remember seeing this when it first came out…it was at the High Museum’s Latin American Film festival.  At that time, I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  It was oddly evocative, but it was hard to put my finger on why.

This time around…knowing del Toro’s work so much better…I had no such problem.  Cronos is a del Toro fantasy tale, plain and simple, and that’s what makes the film so compelling.  First, there’s the dark morality issue.  The grandfather, Jesus, makes a bad choice and is punished for that error.  As that story element is worked out, del Toro uses elements that are bizarre or baroque, a tool kit he frequently uses.  Scenes such as those with the cronos machine digging in suggest things I’d see later in Hell Boy and Blade II, as does the extreme make-up we see in Jesus.  I saw another del Toro interest as I watched the preternatural granddaughter Aurora, who prefigures characters in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Laybrinth.  And then there’s the vaguely once-upon-a-time feeling here.  That’s certainly something we see in later del Toro, too.

My hang up first time around was that I kept wanting to see what the story was getting at beyond what I was watching.  This time around, I watched Cronos as a fantasy that had no real significance beyond being an engaging story with fantastic elements.  For a good movie, that’s plenty.