Ofelia
Last night we saw Pan’s Labyrinth in an attempt to keep our minds off the fact that we weren’t playing World of Warcraft with our online friends. (Perversely, people who pre-ordered from Amazon are getting their copies up to a week after it hit the shelves at Best Buy.)
It was pretty darned good. The evil stepfather is a satisfyingly monstrous instrument of Fascist rule in Spain, and the supernatural monsters are satisfyingly monstrous, too. The soldiers, fascist and rebel, are unconvincing, prone to arbitrary moments of activity or inactivity, and especially to standing mutely in order to frame shots of the major characters. But the fairy-tale elements manage the difficult task of keeping the audience guessing while still observing the ritual elements of fairy tales.
With one noteworthy exception: children in folk tales, and especially little girls, traditionally overcome their trials through patient endurance, doing as they are told, until rescued from their plight. This fairy tale runs parallel to a story of fascist cruelty, and both make a virtue of renouncing blind obedience. Rebellion by reflex gets no praise, but thoughtful rebellion is the defining characteristic of the film’s sympathetic characters. Naturally, the young heroine is the most thoughtfully rebellious of all.
The willful girl (or willful young woman) is a recent addition to fairy tales, only really becoming common as part of the general attention to breaking down stereotypes in the latter 20th century, part of the package including civil rights, feminism, “young adult” literature, and Sesame Street. And now that we’ve got some sterling examples, it seems wondrous that we didn’t get more of them sooner.