Today I Saw Pan’s Labyrinth
There are few films that affected me the way this one did.
When I think of what makes a great film, I think of the first movie I ever saw that took me away to another place for a couple hours and presented ideas and themes that have stuck with me for years. That first experience was one of going up river. Way up river… Yes, it was Apocalypse Now.
The next one that affected me like that was Brazil, and after that, Ran.
Today it was Pan’s Labyrinth. It is a very thought provoking movie that, like Brazil, mixes reality with fantasy. Brazil was set in the future and Pan is set in the past, and, like Brazil, Pan’s Labyrinth is about a struggle against fascism. It’s also the saddest film I’ve ever seen.
The movie juxtaposes a real-life struggle against Franco’s fascist government in 1944 Spain with the fantasy world of a young girl staying with her mother at farmhouse used as a military outpost. Her mother recently married the captain of this base and is carrying his child.
Like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, Captain Vidal is capable of killing with “extreme prejudice.” But unlike Willard, Vidal totally lacks any form of humanity. He is a real monster. Life isn’t so good for the young girl in this movie, so she dreams up a fantasy world where she will live as a princess with her real father and future brother.
I’m no film critic so I won’t review it any more than that. I’ll just recommend that you see it—soon.
After I left the theater I walked about half a block to where there were two college-aged women tending a political kiosk on the sidewalk. I noticed a red-and-black book on the table with a picture of Cheney on the cover. The title of the book was Children of Satan II, The Beast Men. I had to stop.
I asked what they were all about, and one of the women started telling me how America is falling down, how we don’t seem to produce anything in this country anymore, and how so many bad things have happened. She then asked me if I had seen anything really disturbing in the last thirty years. I had to laugh… “Yes,” I told her. I just saw Pan’s Labyrinth. She was unfamiliar with the film even though it was showing in a theater just twenty yards from where she was standing.
We talked a bit more and agreed that the people of this country need to wake up and do something about fascists that are ruining our country.
I ended up walking away with a Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement pamphlet about fighting the fascists.
Strange day…
