Pans Labyrinth
Dec. 19th, 2006 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootObjectively: this is a magnificent film.
Subjectively...
Born in Spain 1939, she would have been 5 at the time of our heroine Ofelia's adventures; 5 and living in the country on her aunt's farm. Resonances, echoes of her old stories and those of my grandparents remain with me. Grandfather was the youngest son of a count, a voluble armchair socialist - and yet also scornful of the local communist mayor, who came after him for payback when the time was right. My grandmother would tell the story of how, roaring drunk, he faced the mayor and friends, and only a local chum saved him, convincing the crowd that grandad was a doctor. He was, but not the kind that practiced medicine . The lie saved his life, and they imprisoned him. As he was taken away to prison, the mayor sat my heavily pregnant grandmother down at a table they had prepared for her; he poured wine out in front of her and bid her watch. They burnt her house down.
Grandfather returned only for the newly victorious nationalists to recall the liberal opinions voiced in his newspaper column, and they took him to prison again. When he came back, he had no teeth. He wore wooden ones to the end of his days.
My mother was there for all this in a way; she was the bump my grandmother carried at the infamous table. Her early childhood was spent in the country and from her I learned a strange mythology; poppies in the field meant death all right, to any farmer, for where they grew was no crop, and famine has ever been the great danger on the peninsula. Not to her though; she would take the stalks and break them and suck the white milk inside, wondering why everyone didn't do the same. Nuts and grains and flowers were always her favourite food; they joked she was half human, half rabbit.
She always shuddered at the idea of fairies, a habit which must have seemed strange to my father. He, as an imaginative child in post war Glasgow, would have preferred to face a dozen redcaps than the grimness of Easterhouse. My mother considered such fantasies ghastly and frightening. Though her stories were often just tales of hearth and farms, the rabbit man and mushroom hunting, a strange thread sometimes emerged from the tapestry; her left hand being tied behind her back so that she would learn to write dexter, to the preference of nuns and priests, her mother telling her that the stars were just dead things (leaving her with the impresssion that god 'wasn't very nice') a firefly killed because people feared its supernatural status as a harbinger of death, a ufo she saw when gathering flowers, faces in the wood whorls, malign and alien; even as an adult, she would see strange beings peek around the curtains at her. Dad used to tease her about it.
I recognised her world, the great twisted trees, the guards around the door, the men in the wood, the old stones and strange insects; even some of the monsters seem familiar. I do not know the place, though the landscape is familiar. But that is not what makes Pan's Labyrinth great. If my family had been born and bred in the East End, this film would still be the best thing I have seen all year.
Note to self: Ofelia and Miranda are related, though I don't know which one came first. Time should make it obvious, but it can't be trusted where fairies are concerned.
Subjectively...
Born in Spain 1939, she would have been 5 at the time of our heroine Ofelia's adventures; 5 and living in the country on her aunt's farm. Resonances, echoes of her old stories and those of my grandparents remain with me. Grandfather was the youngest son of a count, a voluble armchair socialist - and yet also scornful of the local communist mayor, who came after him for payback when the time was right. My grandmother would tell the story of how, roaring drunk, he faced the mayor and friends, and only a local chum saved him, convincing the crowd that grandad was a doctor. He was, but not the kind that practiced medicine . The lie saved his life, and they imprisoned him. As he was taken away to prison, the mayor sat my heavily pregnant grandmother down at a table they had prepared for her; he poured wine out in front of her and bid her watch. They burnt her house down.
Grandfather returned only for the newly victorious nationalists to recall the liberal opinions voiced in his newspaper column, and they took him to prison again. When he came back, he had no teeth. He wore wooden ones to the end of his days.
My mother was there for all this in a way; she was the bump my grandmother carried at the infamous table. Her early childhood was spent in the country and from her I learned a strange mythology; poppies in the field meant death all right, to any farmer, for where they grew was no crop, and famine has ever been the great danger on the peninsula. Not to her though; she would take the stalks and break them and suck the white milk inside, wondering why everyone didn't do the same. Nuts and grains and flowers were always her favourite food; they joked she was half human, half rabbit.
She always shuddered at the idea of fairies, a habit which must have seemed strange to my father. He, as an imaginative child in post war Glasgow, would have preferred to face a dozen redcaps than the grimness of Easterhouse. My mother considered such fantasies ghastly and frightening. Though her stories were often just tales of hearth and farms, the rabbit man and mushroom hunting, a strange thread sometimes emerged from the tapestry; her left hand being tied behind her back so that she would learn to write dexter, to the preference of nuns and priests, her mother telling her that the stars were just dead things (leaving her with the impresssion that god 'wasn't very nice') a firefly killed because people feared its supernatural status as a harbinger of death, a ufo she saw when gathering flowers, faces in the wood whorls, malign and alien; even as an adult, she would see strange beings peek around the curtains at her. Dad used to tease her about it.
I recognised her world, the great twisted trees, the guards around the door, the men in the wood, the old stones and strange insects; even some of the monsters seem familiar. I do not know the place, though the landscape is familiar. But that is not what makes Pan's Labyrinth great. If my family had been born and bred in the East End, this film would still be the best thing I have seen all year.
Note to self: Ofelia and Miranda are related, though I don't know which one came first. Time should make it obvious, but it can't be trusted where fairies are concerned.
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Re: Our own fairy tales
Date: 2006-12-23 02:09 pm (UTC)