So here's Guillermo del Toro, Mexican maestro of the fantasy film, a big fat man with a mess of hair, a ready chuckle and a large leather book held tight across the rolls of his stomach like a Crusader's shield. It would be a hard-hearted hack who could resist that plump, friendly face. If del Toro were to turn into his namesake he would surely be Ferdinand, the bull who sat down in the middle of the ring, chewed the flowers and smiled at the sky instead of fighting.
Yet this jolly man is the author of Pan's Labyrinth, a visual feast of a fantasy film set in Franco's Spain that is so dark, so fired with passion, fear and hope, that it blasted almost everything else at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was first shown, into the blue Mediterranean water. Critics who were not expecting anything quite so viscerally satisfying from the director of Blade II, Hellboy or Mimic, the films he made for US studios, described it as the surprise triumph of the festival; in the past few weeks, Pan's Labyrinth has appeared on various top-10 lists and has been nominated for a Golden Globe for the best film in a foreign language. Mark Kermode, of the London Observer, did not hesitate to declare it the best film of the year.
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Set in a dark Spanish forest in a very dark time — 1944, when Spain was still in the early stages of the fascist nightmare from which the rest of Europe was painfully starting to awaken — "Pan's Labyrinth" is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it's the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children's story, with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication, illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?
The brilliance of "Pan's Labyrinth," which is being released worldwide through May, is that its current of imaginative energy runs both ways. If this is magic realism, it is also the work of a real magician. The director, Guillermo del Toro, unapologetically swears allegiance to a pop-fantasy tradition that encompasses comic books, science fiction and horror movies, but fan-boy pastiche is the last thing on his mind. He is also a thoroughgoing cinephile, steeped in classical technique and film history.
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Mexican film-makers are currently in the ascendant, working together and abroad. The year opened with Tommy Lee Jones's modern western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, scripted by Guillermo Arriaga. Alfonso Cuaron's British dystopian thriller Children of Men is still running. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel (scripted by Arriaga) will be released in January. And Guillermo del Toro's remarkable Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), which Cuaron has produced, appears this week. It's del Toro's sixth film, and his best to date, and like the others it's a horror movie though much less of a genre picture than his Hollywood output.
His previous Spanish film, The Devil's Backbone (2001), was set towards the end of the Civil War at a remote orphanage, and the events - which include the terrible brutality of Franco's troops and a ghost that issues warnings of forthcoming catastrophe - are seen through the eyes of a sensitive young boy. We inevitably think of an earlier Spanish movie, Victor Erice's masterly Spirit of the Beehive, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Pan's Labyrinth is set six years or so later, in 1944, very precisely in June when news of the Allied invasion of Normandy arrives in an authoritarian state where a party of left-wing guerrillas, the last remnants of the Republican army, are hiding out in the mountains.
They are, perhaps fortunately, unaware that Franco will remain dictator for a further 30 years. Hunting them down is a detachment of soldiers led by Captain Vidal, brilliantly played by the handsome, menacing Sergi Lopez, best known in this country for playing the psychopathic killer in Dominik Moll's Harry, He's Here To Help and the evil head porter of a London hotel in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things. Vidal is a ruthless sadist, an archetypal fascist bully trying to live up to the expectations of his father, a military hero killed in North Africa. This would be an exciting thriller in itself, but there is another story of a quite different kind.
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Mythical underworld beasts clash with the real-life monsters of fascism in Guillermo del Toro’s new film. Seen through the eyes of Ofelia, a lonely young girl caught up in the brutal aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth is the most ambitious work yet by the Mexican writer- director of Cronos and Hellboy. Fusing historical drama with horror film, magical realism with political allegory, Del Toro’s eighth film is that rarest of hybrids: a fairytale for adults.
“A fable is a good way to address issues as opposed to addressing them purely as a war movie in a big, selfimportant way,” says the 42-year-old director. “To me, fascism is the moment when all your choices are removed. You are given one single choice to align to, but the idea of the fable is that choice is what makes you free. That’s a very simple parable for me, and the best way to do that was a fairytale. There was something incredibly attractive in creating a world full of creatures and monsters, but making the human characters much more monstrous than them.”
This is not the first time Del Toro has used the Spanish Civil War as a backdrop for a supernatural tale of childhood innocence. His 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone, drew on the same historical hinterland. Now a part-time resident of Madrid, the director grew up besotted with Spanish literature, cinema and comics. The civil war brought “a fascism that was agreed to be overlooked by the world”. This struck a personal chord in Mexico, where exiled film-makers such as Luis Buñuel fled Franco.
“Mexico is one of the few countries that, during the civil war period, was politically supportive of the Republican side,” Del Toro says. “Many people exiled from Spain to Mexico were extremely influential in the arts — actors, directors, production designers. Many became good friends of mine growing up. I heard things about the war that I didn’t read in For Whom the Bell Tolls, heh heh! It was not a grand adventure of macho bravado. It was a much more human, compelling, brutal and small drama.”
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No sooner had he finished shooting his first film than the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro was wanted by the police.
Guillermo del Toro: 'There is a moment in everyone's life when they have the chance to be immortal'
He had closed his production offices, seemingly in a hurry, and a few days later his fellow tenants had reported a disagreeable aroma seeping through his locked door. It was the smell of rotting flesh. And they knew this fanatical young filmmaker had a fascination with death.
"They thought it was a decomposing body," smiles the 41-year-old director. "And I suppose in some sense it was. The Cronos machine [a device in the movie that bestows immortality upon its owner] was partly mechanical but also comprised a living organism, so to make it look right we used real bits of offal. When I went away, I forgot to clean it out; it really stank."
Thankfully for del Toro, the police were satisfied with his explanation, leaving him free to release first the odour and then his film, Cronos. A surreal and chilling re-imagining of a vampire tale, it proved just as potent as the odour, quickly establishing his reputation as a promising and unusual writer-director. The film won the Critics' Prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival before going on to scoop nine Mexican Academy Awards.
Since then, del Toro has made films both inside and outside the Hollywood system, He has had varying degrees of commercial success with his studio projects, from the spluttering Mimic to the soaring Blade II and Hellboy, while winning universal praise for all his Spanish-language films. This month he adds to that canon with Pan's Labyrinth – a dark and intoxicating blend of wartime drama and gothic fairy tale.
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's film "Babel" took home best director and jury prizes at Cannes and is up for a slew of Golden Globe awards, including best picture and best director. Alfonso Cuaron
