I downloaded this film some time ago, but never got around to watching it until last night. I think that subconsciously I was waiting to watch it near the area in which it was filmed, and in which the story takes place.
It's Spain, 1944. The revolution is over, and Franco's troops have won. Outposts have been created at the various frontiers to fight against the still-active anti-Fascists. And into one of these outposts is brought Ofelia (the real star of the movie, a young actress to watch), the stepdaughter-against-her-will to a sadistic Fascist Captain (Sergi Lopez, in a fine but unsympa- thetic performance), whom her mother has married because he knocked her up and wants his unborn son more than he wants anything else in his life. And, of course, he pays for things like food and clothing, stuff that she'd otherwise have little access to in Franco's Spain, since her husband (Ofelia's father) was killed in the revolution as a traitor to the Franco forces. Gnarly situation. Ofelia deals with it the way she deals with other gnarly situations, by retreating into an inner world that only she can see. This world is full of fairies and laby- rinths and fauns and giant frogs and menacing quasihuman beasts with their eyes in the palms of their hands. In this inner world she is a Princess of the realm, someone who had lost her way in a previous incarnation and become trapped in the gnarly world of Fascist Spain. All she has to do to return to the world that she originally came from is to accomplish three dangerous tasks, before the moon becomes full. This is such a marvelous movie, in so many ways, that I can't really go into it here. Seamless special effects make Ofelia's world bloom as accurately for her as it does for us. There is great acting not only from the aforementioned Ivana Baquero, who plays Ofelia, and Sergi Lopez, but one of Ofelia's few friends in the Fascist outpost is played by Maribel Verdú, the radiant and very talented star of "Y tu mama tambien." She is in a way the heroic counterpart in the "real" world of Ofelia in her world. One of the things that I find most interesting about this film, and one of the main reasons I'm writing about it to Fairfield Life, is the sheer consistency of one trend in the reviews of this film I saw in the press. Many critics loved it; I first discovered the film because it wound up on so many critics' Ten Best of 2006 lists. But almost without exception, each of those critics refers to Ofelia's world as "imaginary," the unreal place that she retreats into to escape the horror of her everyday reality. I find that very interesting, because I saw the entire film -- both the shock of Franco's Spain and the beauty/awe of Ofelia's world -- as equal partners in a very real visionscape. I saw the whole film as mythic, and what the critics saw as Ofelia's retreats into fantasy I saw as merely a psychic twostep into another dimension, a separate reality, a parallel universe, to which she alone has access because she alone can see it. I think this is a *marvelous* film, and suspect that many here might find it interesting, too. Marek in particular (I think it was you I had the short conversation with about simultaneous incarnations) might like it. Just think of Ofelia as bouncing back and forth between two simultaneous incarnation-streams, trying to make sense of the simultaneity of it all. If you do watch it, the countryside it's filmed in looks a lot like where I am right now, in Catalunya. That kind of rocky, rugged, rolling countryside, but in my case ending at a beach. Think Big Sur, except that they speak Catalan and Spanish here. That and there are fewer "So you want lipo with that pina colada" bars in Big Sur. But in Big Sur they make the women wear the top parts of their bathing suits, so that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?
