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| Photo source: https://cinapse.co/criterion-review-pans-labyrinth-3978e21b554a |
Plot Summary
The film Pan’s Labyrinth tells the story of a young girl who is named Ofelia with her pregnant mother who is named Carmen and her step-father, Captain Vidal, a corrupt and twisted captain. Directed and also written by Mexican author Guillermo del Toro, the film is set in Spain 1944, a period in history where fascist Franco ruled.
With Ofelia’s encounters a mysterious faun; one of a class of lustful rural gods, represented as a man with a goat's horns, ears, legs, and tail. The faun believes that she is his princess who lives in the Underworld before she dies. The faun then gives her three (3) tasks to accomplish in two (2) weeks to determine whether or not she is worthy to go back to the said kingdom and be the princess that the faun claims her to be. With that, Ofelia desperately wants to escape her life from the real world and return to the said Underworld that she feels she truly belongs.
Eventually, the downfall of captain Vidal feels entirely satisfying and truly justified. By the end of the film, it is not enough for Vidal to simply die as he has done too many truly evil acts for it to be that simple. He must be fully and perfectly annihilated. And by Ofelia’s strong-willed personality and sticking to what she believes in is right and not what the higher person with power tells her to do is what considers her soul worthy of returning to the Underworld.
Interpretations and Symbolism
(I have inserted photos for those who has not yet watched the movie)
- Ofelia just really wants to escape the cruel world she lives in.
- In her first task, Ofelia needs to cure a sick tree, the tree appears to be like a woman’s uterus. This resembles her mother that is sick.
- The reason for the sickness of the tree is because of the toad inside the tree, the toad represents her sibling, the child inside of Carmen’s womb which is causing her mother’s sickness.
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| Photo source: http://www.enjoymyanmarholiday.com/index.php/help/8675/ |
- Ofelia then removes the key which caused the deflation of the toad thus curing the trees sickness. The key represents a phallus, something that you insert in a hole, and because of Ofelia’s anger towards her sibling in her mother’s womb, she wants to remove the child inside it to end her mother’s suffering. Therefore, this scene is a representation of Ofelia wanting to remove the reason for Carmen’s sickness. She successfully cured the tree in her fantasy world where she sadly cannot do in her real world.
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| Photo source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/568438784196148111/?lp=true |
- The pale man represents Ofelia’s step-father Captain Vidal. The dining room of both men are also captured in the same way, a long rectangle table with a monster sitting on the chair of what is supposed to be the head of the family. This was said to be intentional by Del Toro to make the two antagonists of each of Ofelia’s worlds, the real world and the Underworld, resembling one another.
- Also, the pale man’s characteristics represent Vidal’s believes in blindly obeying the chain of command.
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| Photo source: https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/best-cinematography-exploring-light-dark-pans-labyrinth/ |
- Vidal starts off pristinely groomed, hair slicked to perfection, the model commander and a representation of the new fascist regime that everyone would look up to and follow. But, he ends the film physically bruised, drugged and stumbling about after Ofelia in a manner similarly just like in the scary pale man scene.
