Over the past few years three highly talented and ambitious young Mexican film directors—Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu—have made their way into the American mainstream. All three seem to have managed this trick by defining themselves mainly in terms of genre, which isn’t surprising given the industry’s insistence that everything be defined according to pitches and formulas, all in 25 words or less—the consequence of a desire to exhaust existing markets rather than attempt to nurture or create new ones.
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Cuaron’s done some children’s fantasy (A Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and literary adaptation (Great Expectations), a sex comedy/road movie/coming-of-age story (Y Tu Mama Tambien), and now an action-adventure/SF/war movie (Children of Men). His most ambitious movies seem to cram together several genres—or at least the suits’ notions of genres. Del Toro and Gonzalez Inarritu have both stuck to a single genre: del Toro to horror, Gonzalez Inarritu to the art movie. I would never say that “art movie” is a genre, but the studios treat it that way. I don’t much care for Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores Perros, 21 Grams, or Babel, despite his indisputable talent in realizing them. Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento, they suggest that art movies are characterized by misanthropic plots that are little more than puzzles to be solved.
By contrast, del Toro’s adherence to a single genre in Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he wrote the screenplay, makes the film impressively personal and original. As a rule, horror-movie fantasies grow out of some version of humdrum reality, but there’s nothing remotely humdrum about the reality underlying Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s set near a mill and a forest in northern Spain five years after the end of the civil war, in 1944, when the defeated Republicans are still hoping for help from the Allies—help that will never come. It’s a desperate situation, yet much of the story is told from the viewpoint of a little girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), who barely understands what’s happening around her and hardly has any connection to the Republicans, apart from a household servant and a local doctor who are secretly members of the resistance. Ofelia’s widowed mother (Ariadna Gil) has recently married a sadistic captain in the Civil Guard (Sergi Lopez); she’s now pregnant, and he’s preoccupied with having a male heir. He’s insisted she come to this remote area even though it endangers her health.
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Written by Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby with Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Michael Caine, Pam Ferris, and Chiwetel Ejiofor
Pan’s Labyrinth ★★★★
Directed and written by Guillermo del Toro
With Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil, and Doug Jones
