Pan’s Labyrinth…Perfection well defined

If there’s only one day in the whole year that you want to relax and not bother yourself with planning stuff, that would be your Birthday but normally, when you don’t plan something ahead, you dramatically increase the chance of having a plain, unmemorable birthday which ironically is in full contrast with what a birthday is supposed to be, the most special day of the year.

But last night, my 31st birthday was strangely unforgettable

For months, I was impatiently waiting for the latest film of Guillermo Del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, to be screened in Montreal. To my big surprise, as I checked the website for the upcoming movies, I realized that it was supposed to be screened, exactly on my birthday. Therefore, I dearly took it as both my birthday surprise and my mysterious birthday gift.

To be honest, I can hardly remember any better gift, anyone has ever given to me nor anything I can imagine anyone ever will. It was 112 minutes of pure perfection in every possible aspect imaginable. One of the best stories, cinematography’s, acting’s, visual effects and I can go on and on forever, combined with something else from out of this world, a well-balanced combination of all human emotions at their best, to say the least.

Pan’s Labyrinth or “El Laberinto del Fauno”, is the story of a girl, Ofelia (played by Ivana Baquero) who travels with her pregnant mother to a mill-house in northern Spain’s woodlands, to settle with her mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal (played marvelously by Sergi Lopez), a precise, dedicated and viciously brutal fascist officer who’s trying to crush the last remains of resistance to General Franco and his extreme-right dictatorial regime.

Ofelia, guided by a fairy-type creature, enters a labyrinth and is told by a faun that she might be the lost princes of the underworld and should prove herself in series of bizarre missions.

The rest of the story is a spectacular polyphony of her quest in the fantasy land, and the real world’s grim and atrocious brutality of the civil war, in 1944’s Spain.

Del Toro masterfully depicts how the grisly realities of the real world with all its nauseating ghastliness leer and leek to the children’s pure fantasies and transform their dreams from beautiful fairy tales to a tense and frightful world and the way children enthusiastically plunge as deep as possible into their imaginations just to get rid of the cruelty of the environment, surrouding them. He portrays how the tragedy of war imposes an unbearable weight on children’s shoulders, to the point that they innocently carry this unfair burden of responsibilities with themselves, even in their most personal fables. However, he insists that we, humans, in our lowest, are able to create such a ferociously frightening environment that no monster in any imaginative world could ever replicate.

Among thousands of mind-blowing subtleties of this film, I really enjoyed the way Del Toro represents Ofelia’s critical age, being on the verge of puberty, by occasionally letting her show of a little bit of feminine charm, while perfectly preserves her innocence as a child.

The film, both the illustration of the fairyland and the depiction of the real world’s civil war, has been executed so brilliantly, meticulously and eloquently that it seems impossible to alter any element of this movie and come up with a better film than what Pan’s labyrinth is and that’s what I call a shear Perfection.

To me, THE best film of the year, an instant classic and one of the top ten movies of all time.

Thanks Gillermo for this magnificent birthday present.