Pan's labyrinth

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Movie
German title Pan's labyrinth
Original title El laberinto del fauno
Country of production Spain , Mexico
original language Spanish
Publishing year 2006
length 119 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Guillermo del Toro
script Guillermo del Toro
production Alfonso Cuarón
Bertha Navarro
Guillermo del Toro
Frida Torresblanco
music Javier Navarrete
camera Guillermo Navarro
cut Bernat Vilaplana
occupation
synchronization

Pan's Labyrinth (Original title: El laberinto del fauno ) is a feature film from 2006, which Guillermo del Toro directed and also wrote the script. The film, which takes place against the backdrop of military repression in the period after the Spanish Civil War , is a mixture of film drama and fantasy film . The German theatrical release of the film was on February 22, 2007.

action

The film begins with a scene in which a dark-haired girl is lying on a stone floor, bleeding and breathing heavily.

1944 - The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which ended with the victory of the fascists under Franco , is over, while World War II is still raging around the world . The Francoist captain Vidal is with his troops in the mountains of northern Spain. He has set up his headquarters in an abandoned mill. From there he fights partisans who are resisting from the nearby mountains. He recently married Carmen, who is now heavily pregnant and has an 11-year-old daughter, Ofelia. When the two are on their way to see the captain, their car stops because Carmen vomits. A little off the road, Ofelia finds a stone statue from which an oversized insect ( praying mantis ) is crawling after Ofelia has replaced a stone lying on the road, which is the statue's missing right eye. When Ofelia is called back and the car continues, the insect follows the motorcade.

For her stepfather, who acts against the partisans with extreme brutality, Ofelia is a disruptive factor, which she notices immediately when she first meets him. Next to the mill is an old brickwork with a large gate - Mercedes, one of the captain's servants, tells Ofelia that this is a labyrinth and has been there for a very long time, much longer than the mill.

On the first night ofelia unable to sleep next to her mother, the insect reappears. Ofelia shows him her storybook, in which a fairy is depicted. The insect looks at the picture and - with great effort - transforms into a fairy. Finally it leads the girl into the stone labyrinth. Arrived in the middle, which resembles a clearing, Ofelia goes down a spiral staircase made of stone. On the dark ground she finds nothing but another stone sculpture depicting a Pan, a girl and a baby. She meets Pan for the first time, who, as if awakening from a hibernation, is still shakily looking at the little girl. He happily tells Ofelia that she is the reincarnation of a princess who once left her subterranean realm out of curiosity, has become human over time and has forgotten her true identity. The princess's father, the king, is still waiting for her. Ofelia could break the curse and help the fading magical world to come back to life by returning there.

However, she has to pass three tests, says the Pan, in order to determine whether the princess's soul has not been with the people for too long and has lost her immortality in the process. Ofelia must have passed the tests by the next full moon night - otherwise she would be doomed forever to live with people, to age and eventually to die. He gives her a book with blank pages in which, however, the exams will later appear as texts and drawings as if by magic. Ofelia returns to the house.

The next day the captain invited important personalities to an evening celebration, and Ofelia's mother sewed a dress for her. Ofelia sets out to take the first exam. A giant toad sits under an ancient, large tree, which slowly causes the tree to die. Ofelia is supposed to kill the toad and get a key out of its stomach to save the tree. She succeeds, but her beautiful dress, which she has hung on a branch of the tree - so as not to get it dirty - has been blown to the ground by the wind and is now completely filthy. The mother is horrified and angry and sends Ofelia to bed without supper.

Ofelia finds out that the maid Mercedes and the doctor Dr. Ferreiro cooperate with the partisans - they sneak out at night and the doctor amputates a wounded partisan's leg, which has been infected by gangrene. Her heavily pregnant mother is getting worse and worse, which is why Ofelia does not start the second exam. Angry Pan appears in her room and gives her a mandrake . Ofelia is supposed to put the mandrake in a bowl with milk under her mother's bed and feed her two drops of her blood every day. Immediately her mother is better. Ofelia now has the opportunity to take the second exam.

She has to paint a chalk door on the wall, which then materializes. Behind it is a room in which an opulent feast is served. The pan had warned her not to eat or drink anything. She also has to return from this dangerous place before the hourglass that he gave her along with the chalk runs out. To help her, he gives her three fairies to guide her. At the end of the table an eyeless humanoid monster sits motionless, its eyeballs on an iron plate in front of him. Ofelia finds three small compartments on the wall, each with a lock. The fairies point to the middle compartment, but Ofelia chooses the one on the left, opens it and finds a dagger in it. The pale creature at the table still doesn't move, and Ofelia, still hungry from the previous day, eats two grapes, although the fairies are desperate to stop her. The white creature then wakes up and sticks its eyeballs in its palms. The child eater (stained glass on the ceiling shows his terrible deeds, and there are hundreds of children's shoes in one corner) seizes two of the fairies who want to stop him and bites their heads off. Ofelia can only escape with luck through a second chalk door she draws on the ceiling, as the first one had already closed because the hourglass had expired.

The Pan is furious and accuses her of failing because of her disobedience; then he disappears. Ofelia tries to put new drops of blood into the jar with the mandrake, but her stepfather catches her doing it. Desperate to have completely lost control of her daughter, the mother throws the mandrake into the fireplace. At the same moment she went into violent labor. Vidal has now caught a group of partisans in the woods and killed all of them except for one, whom he now brutally tortures all night long. The doctor relieved the tortured partisan the next morning with a morphine injection. Vidal, who discovered from the same penicillin ampoules that the doctor is helping the rebels, shoots them from behind. Carmen dies in childbirth, but the newborn child, Vidal's biological son, survives. When Vidal's suspicion that Mercedes is also cooperating with the partisans comes true, he decides to confront them. Ofelia wants to flee into the woods with Mercedes, but the two are found not far from the house. Ofelia is locked in her room while Mercedes is about to be tortured. She is able to free herself with her hidden kitchen knife and injure the captain with several stabs in the back, chest and face. She escapes into the mountains, where the soldiers who are supposed to bring her back are shot by the partisans.

It is a full moon night. Ofelia is alone and desperate in her room when Pan suddenly shows up and wants to give her one last chance if she obeys him without contradictions or questions. She should come to the labyrinth with her little brother. Since her room is guarded, Pan gives her another piece of chalk, which she uses to get straight into the captain's room. Her stepfather is about to get drunk while sewing his left cheek, which Mercedes has slashed. Meanwhile, an overwhelming force of partisans attacked the court. When Ofelia runs out of the room with his son, the captain runs after her. But because Ofelia has drizzled her mother's sedative into his schnapps, his drowsiness makes it difficult for him to catch up with her.

In the labyrinth Ofelia escapes the captain first. In the light of the full moon, the Pan Ofelia reveals her last test: she is said to injure her brother with the dagger from the second test, since the blood of an innocent person has to be sacrificed to return to her father's kingdom. Ofelia refuses. The Pan is angry and urges them to act. Ofelia refuses again. The Pan leaves her with the sentence that if this is her wish, then she must stay in the human world forever.

Captain Vidal, who cannot see the Pan, finds Ofelia when she is standing in the middle of the maze with his son in her arms, speaking into space. He takes the child away from her and shoots the girl. She lies on the floor bleeding to death, you can recognize the scene from the beginning of the film. Vidal leaves the labyrinth and is captured at the entrance by the partisans who have captured the base. In anticipation of his death, he hands the baby over to Mercedes and wants to stage his death as a heroic death that his son should be told. But Mercedes explains to him that his son will not even know his father's name. Her brother shoots Vidal, and the group finds Ofelia dying in the maze. Her blood drips down into the shaft as a warm light flows around her. Ofelia's blood opens the way for her to the subterranean realm, where she meets her parents and Pan again. The father explains to her that she passed the final and most important test by being willing to sacrifice herself instead of shedding innocent blood. In the real world, Ofelia smiles one last time before her human body dies in the arms of the weeping Mercedes.

A white blossom sprouts on the tree on which Ofelia had hung her green dress. The fairy, who is now an insect again, sits down on the branch next to the flower.

Media publication

The German DVD release took place on July 30, 2007. A single DVD was released , which u. a. contains an audio commentary , as well as a 3-Disc Collector's Edition in a digipack , which contains three DVDs with additional bonus material. The version with three DVDs is also available as a so-called limited edition with a 100-page storyboard book. The German Blu-ray release took place on September 10, 2007. In addition to the audio commentary, it contains a featurette and a trailer.

Reviews

“In the form of a phantasmagoric genre blend, the visually stunning, fantastic film offers a counter-world for 'horror reality'. The second part of the director's 'Spanish Trilogy' is certainly not a children's film, is full of cinematic reverence and does not shy away from cruelty in order to create a bitter reflection on the Spanish history of the past century. "

- Lexicon of international film

“In the midst of this sometimes melancholy, sometimes hopeful scene, however, the twelve-year-old leading actress Ivana Baquero seems a bit wooden and lost. But the surreal power of del Toro's pictures compensates for such weaknesses. "

- cinema

"Certainly one of the highlights of the 2006 cinema year. Great craftsmanship meets political empathy in the fantastic Alice-in-Wonderland setting."

- Rudolf Inderst : film mirror

“Fantasy parable about the atrocities of fascism and the redeeming power of childlike imagination, which impresses with its visual brilliance and, with its historical references, does not only appeal to fans of fantasy films. The two levels of the film, however, are strangely disconnected in places. "

- Sarah Mersch : Cinefacts

"A tragic fairy tale for adults and a poetic allegory of fascism, in which uncanny fantasy and bloody reality merge: a masterpiece by the Mexican Guillermo del Toro."

- epd film

"A work of which one can say with certainty that it is not only one of the enduring works of the year, but also of this decade."

- Rüdiger Suchsland : film service

Awards

synchronization

Trivia

  • The German power metal band Solar Fragment wrote the song Moana's Return based on the story of the film .
  • Director Guillermo del Toro prepared the film for a year, shooting took four months and post-production six months.
  • The eponymous mythical creature is called el fauno ("the faun ") in the Spanish original . In order to avoid confusing the words faun and fawn (German: fawn), which sound the same in English , the name was changed to " Pan " in the English version . This change was also adopted in the French and German film versions. In Greek mythology, Pan is the god of the forest and nature. Toro had deliberately avoided the term “Pan” because of the character's erotic connotations, which he found unsuitable for an eleven-year-old girl.
  • Ironically, Captain Vidal puts on several times in the film the song Soy un Pobre Presidiario by the singer Angelillo (1908–1973), who was an avowed republican and communist.

Novel adaptation

In 2019, Cornelia Funke and Guillermo del Toro published the adaptation of the film under the title "Das Labyrinth des Faun" in S. Fischer Verlag . The audio book version is spoken by Tom Vogt and the author herself.

Also in 2019 the English-language edition "Pan's Labyrinth - The Labyrinth of the Faun" was published by Harper Collins and Bloomsbury .

literature

  • Claudia Burger: Fantastic elements in the film El laberinto del fauno by Guillermo del Toro . Thesis. Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, 2013 ( PDF file; 1315 kB ).
  • Sabrina Geilert, Juliane Voorgang: On the discursiveness of classic fairy tales in current TV productions and in contemporary cinema . Narrative transformation achievements and film aesthetic appropriations using the example of E. Kitsis' / A. Horowitz '"Once upon a time" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth". In: Studies on German Language and Literature, Vol. 2, No. 30 (2013), pp. 155–187. ( PDF file )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ (78% Spanish production, 22% Mexican production) EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO . Retrieved June 21, 2015.
  2. ↑ Release certificate for Pan's labyrinth . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2007 (PDF; test number: 108 777 K).
  3. ↑ Age rating for Pan's labyrinth . Youth Media Commission .
  4. ↑ a b Pan's labyrinth in the online film database
  5. ↑ Pan's Labyrinth. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ↑ Critique on cinema.de
  7. ↑ Criticism on filmspiegel.de ( Memento of the original from January 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.filmspiegel.de
  8. ↑ Review of Cinefacts
  9. ↑ epd Film 2/2007 p. 47
  10. ↑ film-dienst 4/2007
  11. ^ Robert Leger: Song Introduction: Moana's Return | SOLAR FRAGMENT. August 3, 2010, Retrieved November 18, 2019 (American English).
  12. ^ J. Francisco Aranda: Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography Da Capo Press, New York 1976, ISBN 978-0-306-70754-4 , p. 109.
  13. ↑ Der Sonntag (Karlsruhe), December 16, 2018, p. 6.
  14. ↑ Cornelia Funke - The official homepage. Retrieved July 12, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Cornelia Funke - The Official Website. Retrieved July 12, 2019 .